I recently had the need to calculate the distance from a point (address point) to a polyline (street segment) and wanted to avoid using any additional libraries because it was being done for an external client. Ok, I actually used arcgisscripting for reading the data but that lacked, from what I could tell, the fine-detail granularity of measuring distance between individual geometries. But since the only spatial operations I needed were to measure the distance between two points and the distance between a point and polyline, I decided to just do it via brute force.