I was at a customer location recently and they asked me, "Why is your control so big? My performance is being hurt by having to reload this huge map control every time I load my page." Hmm, time to investigate.... I opened up Firebug in Firefox and took a quick peek at the Virtual Earth Map Control... 891kb!!! Wow! That is huge. Something's wrong. I'll give you the abridged version of what I found. Some corporate networks using proxy servers strip gzip compression . We use compression to shrink the size of the control to improve performance when distributing it to end users. If your proxy is removing the compression you get the 891kb version of the control (as seen above). The good...
Juan DoNeblo has the skinny on rendering your ESRI .shp files on Virtual Earth . This is a fantastic how-to that was posted back in April around the time of the ESRI Developers Summit . Microsoft has a strong partnership with ESRI as they are one of the top Microsoft ISVs . What's unique about the integration Juan depicts and what's been shown to date, is that Juan renders all of the information in vector format. Most folks rasterize their GIS data and use the map.AddTileLayer() method for viewing the data. The benefit of using VEShape class instead is that the vector information becomes interactive and you can use VE Map Events to provide additional information about each respective shape. In...
"Innovating to Improve the Planet." That's the mantra of the Microsoft Environment Group . Did you know about them? Their is sole focus is the environment and what we can do to improve it. In fact, their mission statement is posted on the main Microsoft Environment site : " At Microsoft, we believe in the potential of software and technology to help people and businesses around the world foster environmental sustainability. Discover how Microsoft and its partners use innovative technologies and responsible business practices to address environmental challenges worldwide. " Well, since we (The Virtual Earth Group) virtualize the world many of their projects have synergies with...
Catherine Heller and I did these videos last year for Channel 10 and for some reason I never found out they were published...until today. They're still valid (for the most part) though much has changed with the Live UI. It can provide you with some Virtual Earth API and Live Search Maps enjoyment...at the very least you can watch us make fools of ourselves trying to be TV personalities. Get some popcorn. No, get Kettle Corn. That stuff is awesome! Just work it off later. ;-) Virtual Earth Virtual Earth Integration - So yesterday Catherine Heller and Chris Pendleton brought you the basics of Live Search Maps. Today is all about the integration. How does Live Search Maps work with other services...
Marc Schweigert wrote a great blog post and provided some code samples for an application he wrote combining Virtual Earth and WPF . I absolutely had to post a traceback to his blog to get folks steered over to get the samples, because this is money. Yes, Marc, we're all looking forward to your Channel 9 Screencast of a code walk through, so don't keep us waiting. If you'd like to see a sample of WPF and Virtual Earth while you're sipping your latte, you can check out my previous post of Virtual Earth and WPF with a Silverlight Streaming video of the interaction. After watching this, there won't be many questions as to why I get excited about VE and WPF. CP
20TB of new imagery....laughable compared to the 69TB+ from May's Virtual Earth Imagery Release ; then again, when's the last time you transferred 20TB of data? :) Here's the list for June: Orthos (Microsoft UltraCam) Toledo, OH Iowa City, IA Independence, MO Gary/Hammond, IN Fort Wayne, IN Duluth, MN Orthos (non-UltraCam) Canada Halifax, NS Moncton, NB St. John, NB Halton, ON Muskoka, ON France West coast and Southern coast at 1m resolution. Corsica Guadeloupe Saint Barthelemy Martinique French Guiana Reunion Cities with 50,000 pop or greater at 50cm resolution. CA Amiens MTtropole CA Angers Loire MTtropole CA AnnTcienne CA BTziers MTditerranTe CA Bourges Plus CA Caen la Mer CA Castelroussine...
Perhaps you know that Virtual Earth-3DVia by Dassault Systems is our software for creating models in Virtual Earth 3D ; perhaps you didn't. I haven't seen many models built out, but what I've seen have been okay - just okay. If you have some sweet models that you're proud of send the link to your collection. I had issues installing 3DVia to the point that 3DVia just rendered a black screen. My RAM had vanquished and I had to work in a subzero fridge so my CPU didn't catch my paltry video card aflame. 3DVia is a free download from Microsoft. You can get it on Live Search Maps when you click 3D in the navigation control (there's an option while you install the 3D plug-in); or, download it directly...
We're just starting a new program called "GoVE" which enables municipalities, state and local governments, aerial photographers, carrier pigeons, whoever, to share your imagery with Microsoft for publishing onto Virtual Earth the platform that powers thousands of enterprise applications, not to mention our own Live Search Maps . Now your imagery can be part of the Virtual Earth we're creating. Join in the world changing event that is Microsoft Virtual Earth. Here are some FAQs about the program: Why should we publish our imagery in VE? GoVE supports the data sharing goals of many public sector organizations by providing a free publishing service. Through GoVE, your taxpayer-funded information...
Friday we released an updated version of the MapPoint Web Service SDK 4.7 . There's nothing new in terms of functionality for the SOAP XML APIs, but we did update the docs to include a new version of the road network coverage. So, now you get a better idea of what the MapPoint Web Service Geographic Coverage is. You will now see the country and instead of a percentage (like what we used to provide which was somewhat useless) you will see a better descriptor such as "Full," "Capital Only," "Major Cities Only" or "Full, but missing [some area]." MapPoint Web Service only contains maps, so there's still no coverage map of our aerial photography or satellite...
The MSN Entertainment Team in The UK rolled their Celebrity Spotter out a bit ago, but has been getting good traffic, they continue to keep the feed of information updated and it has Virtual Earth as the interface for finding data. The concept is about keeping track of celebrity appearances over the course of the next four weeks. You can choose from one of the following categories of people to follow: Arts, Awards, Fashion, Film, Media, Music, Parties, Society and Royal, Sport and Stage; or, you can just Select All. I have some major revisions for this. Like, why can't I search for a name? I looked in Music and found the loveable Amy Winehouse as one of the results. And, there has to be a ton...
It's Friday and a rare sunny, beautiful day in Redmond. I'm feeling good and will be hitting the outdoors as soon as possible - we tend to cut our days short when the sun comes out. Perhaps this is why response times from me are shorter in the summer. Oh, so back to my point, Bahama Breeze is a place I love to eat at outdoors. There's only one near Seattle and it's in Tukwila which is about 25 minutes from Redmond (and Seattle) near the airport. I see it every time I come and go from the SeaTac Airport but it's just not Caribbean enough in Seattle for me to frequently get in the mood....until today. And, now I can use the Bahama Breeze store locator powered by Virtual Earth. In fact, I can search...
Devin Coldewey has a great write-up on some new things the Surface team rolled out including their new SDK. But, more relevantly, a photo geotagging application for Surface using Virtual Earth . Per Coldewey, " Next we saw probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Essentially a geotagged photos viewing application, it had Virtual Earth (very fun to play with, as I did without permission for a bit) and spread across the world were little photos. The photos were placed on the map exactly where they were taken and they could be selected by hand gestures, or filtered by other means so that only, say, panoramic photos taken in 2007 would show up. " That IS pretty cool...
We've officially launched our staging environment which allow you to access Virtual Earth features without incurring transaction costs for hitting production. Plus, we can stage new features allowing you to new stuff and regression test for backwards compatibility. Here's the official communication from the product group: " Better Reporting for Better Business Intelligence The Microsoft Virtual Earth Customer Identification feature is an important part of the Virtual Earth platform. This feature allows you to access and view reports detailing your application’s platform usage from the Virtual Earth Platform Customer Services site. These reports display information about your Virtual...
I'm seeing lots of Virtual Earth integration in Silverlight light. And, I have to say I LOVE IT. Today is no exception. IDV Solutions just launched their Silverlight Map Viewer which is their new interface for their Visual Fusion Server product. This is a big move for IDV as most of their stack is Microsoft technology and the Flash interface was one of the remaining artifacts in moving to a complete Microsoft stack. What else? How about Soul Solutions who published Deep Earth on CodePlex ? Deep Earth is an open source community project that combines the interactive experience in Silverlight 2 Deep Zoom with photo tiles from Virtual Earth. This actually featured on Channel 9 - " DeepEarth...
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is an incredible new visualization technology from Microsoft and since we are "One Microsoft" with some extremely exciting user experience software coming to the forefront - see Silverlight , Seadragon (aka Deep Zoom) and Surface as examples - Virtual Earth is being the fifth of the beautiful interfaces in our UX arsenal why not marry some of them? Well, I showed Silverlight and Virtual Earth at the MIX conference this year. Well, here's a 3D demonstration put together by Identity Mine for Accruent illustrating exactly why Virtual Earth and WPF can change the way we mine, examine and visualize data. The application illustrates ways of doing what...
