February 2006 - Bing Maps Blog

1. 

   Virtual Earth Highlight: Windows Live Expo

   02/28/06 by Chris Pendleton | 0 Replies |

   This afternoon, Windows Live Expo was released as a public beta. It is a great classifieds site with some unique features such as scoping the posts you see to a particular area or to a group close to you like your Messenger buddy list. Check it out: http://expo.live.com/ So, why is this on the Virtual Earth developer blog? Well, Expo allows it's users to map out the results of their search on a Virtual Earth map control. Check out the "Map Results" option in any search results listing or category browse page.
2. 

   Virtual Earth Technology Preview: Street-side Imagery

   02/28/06 by Chris Pendleton | 0 Replies |

   Today, the Virtual Earth team released a new Technology Preview of street-side imagery. Take a look: http://preview.local.live.com/ This release is not a final product, and is being released early in the development process so we can engage with the community and gather feedback on the feature concept and our implementation. We plan to integrate a more complete version of the functionality into the Windows Live Local site and the Virtual Earth platform sometime this summer. Today, only two cities are covered: Seattle, WA and San Francisco, CA, with many more to come later. The current build is not complete and thus not ready for mashups or application development. When the feature is integrated...
3. 

   Map Control: Zoom Levels -> Resolution

   02/25/06 by Chris Pendleton | 15 Replies |

   A common question we get is, "What is the resolution or scale at a particular zoom level in Virtual Earth or Windows Live Local ?" Well, that is actually a little more complex of answer than you might expect. We use Mercator projection across the maps in the Virtual Earth Map Control so they can be be cut up into image tiles for quick delivery to clients and reliable stitching back together of the images. But, because it is a cylindrical projection, the map gets distorted as you approach the poles--just look at Antarctica to see the effect. So, we measure the effective resolution at the equator where there is the least distortion. The resolution at the equator for each zoom level (see this earlier...
4. 

   Map Control: Picking the Right Zoom Level

   02/25/06 by Chris Pendleton | 4 Replies |

   When instantiating the Map Control, you have the option to specify a starting coordinate set and zoom level for road or aerial view. But, you might be scratching your head on exactly what zoom level to start at if you want to get a particular level of detail. I find the quickest way to find a good zoom level is to fire up Windows Live Local and get the view to exactly where you would like to start your map. Then, you can generate a permalink and quickly pick the zoom level out of there--just look the section of the URL that looks like " lvl=14 ", which is the query string parameter we use to hold the zoom level. Just take that number and put it in your "params.zoomlevel=" parameter. The same...
5. 

   Firefox Support: Something to Experiment With

   02/13/06 by Chris Pendleton | 2 Replies |

   As many of you have pointed out to me, the v2 control does not support firefox as well as the Windows Live Local site does. There is actually a wedge you can put in place to fix most of these issues, but it is not officially part of the SDK today. To use the wedge, add the following line to your html as the first line in the body element: <![if !IE]><script src="http://local.live.com/JS/AtlasCompat.js"></script><![endif]> After this is added, your application should start showing properly in FireFox. Try it out, let me know if it works for you. Moving forward, we will build this support into the control. THE DISCLAIMER: As I said above, it is not officially part of the...
6. 

   Virtual Earth and AJAX Tutorial

   02/09/06 by Chris Pendleton | 0 Replies |

   Steve over on MSN Spaces, one of product PMs who blogs all things Windows Live Local and Virtual Earth, has added some developer information to his stash of normally end user oriented stuff. He wrote a great 3 part tutorial on AJAX and VE dev. Here is his description of the three parts: Part 1 – Basic mapping application built with the Virtual Earth Control. Pan and zoom with the onscreen compass, Mouse wheel, Drag box, or keyboard. Each time the map moves, we draw a marker icon dead center of the visible map area. In part two, it is the coordinate of this marker we’ll be passing to the server. Part 2 – We add a link in the page that fires off an asynchronous call to a server component. We pass...