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For those of you who are accessing the Virtual Earth tile system directly for integration into a Silverlight, WPF or Flash interface we now have a way for you to legitimize yourselves. First off, we recognize that without a Flash control for the Flex development environment or a Silverlight control we have a bit of a shortcoming for you creating some extremely innovative and scalable sites; however, we've worked to overcome contract and technical hurdles so you can use a Flash, WPF or Silverlight interface by accessing our tile servers directly - meaning, you're pulling the URLs for the tiles and stitching them together yourselves effectively creating your own Silverlight, WPF of Flash map controls...
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2 Unlimited need not show for this party. Check out the latest video showcase the V2 Virtual Earth 3D building models. V2 of our building models are available in Las Vegas , Dallas , Denver and Phoenix . There are still another 250+ cities with photo-textured, scaled building models published in V1 that will get updated in the upcoming months. Watch the video and crank up your speakers . Video: Microsoft Virtual Earth - Spring 2008 Release CP
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Today, NBC launched there "Where in the world is Matt Lauer" campaign and this morning I saw that he was in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Wow - the ultimate boondoggle. What a stud. Anyway, as a part of this campaign, Live Search Club (free online games) has released the game " Discover the World with Matt Lauer. " The game is pretty straight forward and uses Virtual Earth and Live Search to add to the fun. The game will prompt you with questions about different geographies. As you get stumped - I got to question 2 - you can leverage Live Search on the bottom half of the screen to research the answer. Once the correct answer is selected, the Virtual Earth map will center on the location in question...
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Ed Katibah (Spatial Ed) and I are doing a workshop Monday, April 28 morning at The Location Intelligence Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The workshop will focus on integration points between Virtual Earth and SQL Server. The workshop starts at 9AM. We provided the following description: Title: Microsoft Spatial Company: Microsoft Presenter: Chris Pendleton and Ed Katibah Room: Ballroom C Description: : This workshop provides an in-depth look at both Microsoft SQL Server Spatial and Microsoft Virtual Earth products. Come see how the union of these two platforms illustrate the power of both geo-spatial querying and geo-data visualization within a single Microsoft solution. If you want to learn about...
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More on the utilities front - BC Hydro is using Virtual Earth to show their customers outages that they are aware of in British Columbia. First off - I love this. I lost power in my house in Woodinville, WA when the wind storms 16 months ago knocked out power for most of the eastside of Seattle. Puget Sound Energy had posted a PDF of outages they were aware of, but the map was a static PDF that no one ever updated after it was first published. I had no idea when my electricity was going to be back on, nor did I know if they were even aware that 25 trees were lain across the wires at the top of my neighborhood. Providing a dynamic solution (such as what BC Hydro has provided) allows customers...
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The French MSN Entertainment team did a sweet mashup for the release of the new Indian Jones movie - Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . The application highlights different scenes in the movie, specifically where they take place across the globe. Yes, it's in French since the movie debuted in France at the Cannes Film Festival. The application uses our raster overlay capabilities. You can take your own images or PDFs (such as this map) and layer them atop of Virtual Earth to give your maps a more custom look and feel. There are a few different ways to overlay rasters atop of Virtual Earth - (a) you can " Build Your Own Tile Server " as documented in the MSDN Technical Article;...
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Marc Schweigert has updated his Intellisense helper for developing Virtual Earth applications in Visual Studio. The new version is updated to support the new features of Virtual Earth 6.1 . Read all about it on Mark's blog . CP
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It's been a crazy travel schedule and I'm just now getting a chance to do some blogging (and not for long). NAB in Vegas was awesome - I had no idea how much cool stuff the media guys get to play with. Virtual Earth has been added to a lot of the editing software, so I'm expecting to see some cool broadcast, shows, movies, etc. using Virtual Earth. So, it's Earth Day and I figured I'd post something that combines it with Virtual Earth. Enter Sungevity . The site allows you to pin point your house (in California right now) and request information about solar power. I tried my former town home in San Diego (Mission Valley). I'm waiting for the email now about information, but it's apparently not...
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Johannes Kebeck of our EMEA Virtual Earth Team is giving a technical briefing for Virtual Earth on May 8, 2008 @ 10 GMT, London. If you're available and interested you can tune into this free web cast to hear the latest and greatest about VE and a heavy dose of Version 6.1 and probably a peppering of SQL Server 2008 Spatial. You can register for the event on the Microsoft Events Web Site . This is part of a quarterly review for the EMEA group focused on Virtual Earth. "Hey, Chris, why aren't you giving us quarterly updates?" Hmm. IDK. Maybe, I'll do something like that too. I was doing updates every release, but now I just blog. There are only so many hours in the day, I suppose. For now, I'll...
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I love the big city. I spend a fair amount of time in downtown areas like New York, Seattle and San Francisco, so something like walking directions is a very valuable feature for me. I spend a lot of time in LA too, but who walks in LA?? You remember the MIssing Persons song, Walking in LA , "Nobody walks in LA." I digress. So, check out this new "routing" feature. My typical day in NYC starts at the Marriott Marquis in Midtown. I like to walk to Starbucks to get some diesel to help me compensate for the time difference when going East. Let's say that instead of walking to one of the two that are kitty-corner from the hotel I chose to walk a bit further for a bit of exercise. So, I'm going to...
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As you patiently wait on the release of the docs (sometime around noon today) I figured I'd post a quick blog to get you testing the backwards compatibility (and some challenges associated with it). I'm going to use the geocoding application I wrote in a post a couple days ago to show the new locale requirements for geocoding. So, first thing is how to you access VE Version 6.1? Change your JS Link from http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6 to http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.1 . Just swapping that our allows you to test against the new version. Okay, so for geocoding and specifying the locale you just need to add the mkt parameter to the URL string...
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Today we launched a new version of the Virtual Earth API . The release has a host of new features and takes advantage of some of the capabilities you've been envying on Live Search Maps. Below is a laundry list of new features in Virtual Earth 6.1 that we added today. The good news is that 6.1 is fully backwards compatible to Version 6.0. You just need to update you JavaScript Link URL string to get the new version..The Interactive SDK was updated, as well as, the SDK on MSDN . Immersive Imagery Virtual Earth is an industry leader in providing precise views of the world through bird’s eye 1 view and panning, and improved 3D model accuracy and resolution, among other features. Precise imagery...
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I'll be stepping away from The National Association of Broadcaster's Conference in Las Vegas for a day to present at the Environmental Support Solutions Conference in Phoenix April 15. ESS is " the industry's premier conference dedicated to enabling software technologies for environmental stewardship and corporate sustainability. This global forum will bring together responsible EH&S and Crisis Management professionals from around the world to share how their organizations are leveraging technology to reach corporate sustainability goals. " Review the agenda for details, but my session starts at 2PM on Tuesday April 15 in the Crisis Room - sounds appropriate. My session summary is below:...
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I need to mention an API that many people don't know exist and that's the API that allows you to publish data right to Live Search Maps using URL parameters. If you click on the " Help " link on the bottom right of Live Search Maps you get a help file popup. From there you can look up problems with Live Search Maps and other stuff, but more importantly you can pull up the API documentation for how to publish data directly to Live Search Maps by passing in the respective arguments in a URL string. Search for "API" and the first result will be "Build your own URL" as shown below. So, if Virtual Earth is a little more than you need, but Live Search Maps is just not enough perhaps this methodology...
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There's a new site on the web that focuses on calling out specific features of Live Search Maps - Virtual Bird's Eye . The site "focuses on linking to cool places, news stories, event and random locations." The site has tons of posts to cool places that just look amazing in Bird's Eye View and has rotating content. This week's focus is Major League Baseball, so there are links directly to all of the MLB stadiums around the US. Last week was all about The Professional Golfer's Association. Check out the 3D flyover tour of the Augusta golf course in Georgia. They took advantage of the 3D Tours feature on Live Search Maps which allows you to create a collection in Live Search Maps (inclusive of...
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