By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 30 May 2009
DeepEarth will become an innovation centre for controls, libraries and services for use on any Silverlight mapping platform.
Some Background DeepEarth began as a project for likeminded developers to explore what the power of Silverlight, DeepZoom and Maps could do. Huge contributions from developers like Shaun, Rick and David created an innovative open source map control with many components. At Christmas 2008 we produced a V1 release and followed up with a V1.1, many developers have downloaded and used the control with successful results. But a few things happened in March this year which stalled the project:
Microsoft released Silverlight 3 preview Microsoft release the Virtual Earth CTP Silverlight control ESRI released a Silverlight control None of these were unexpected but certainly these made me think about what would be best for DeepEarth and developers wanting to contribute to this space. Some lessons I have learnt over the life of the project:
The project must be very simple to get running on your machine, tokens, source safe files and many web projects makes this tricky. For people to easily contribute a few days of their valuable time the solution needs to be easy to understand or else all effort is used in just getting to terms with the existing code. People want to contribute code, more flexibility is required in giving write access (Developer Role) Everyone's time is precious and although we enjoy coding new exciting silverlight controls it often takes a back seat to other commitments. Commercially it is impossible to use an unsupported open source control for production environments New Direction Firstly we...
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By Soul Solutions on
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
![johnWeeGo[1]](/Portals/0/johnWeeGo.jpg "johnWeeGo[1]") I was asked on the MSDN VE forum if the new Silverlight control had pushpins and indeed clustered pushpins. The answer is that it doesn’t have the concept of a pushpin but rather a much more flexible method of attaching any UIElement to the map.
In terms of clustering this is very possible but today I’d like to start by showing Powerlaw scaling from Lutz applied to the VE control.
Powerlaw scaling applies a scale transform to the object based on the zoomlevel. It makes the object full size at street level and tiny at world level. It produces a more realistic effect as you zoom in and out where a static sized object appears to grow as you zoom out.
The interesting part of this is it allows you to show...
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 4 May 2009
  Thursday 30 April we held our 5th Girl Geek Dinner in Brisbane. This event was a bit different to the previous ones as we all converged upon the Microsoft office in Brisbane to have a night of Game playing.
Tracy Whitelaw was our guest speaker for the night and I’m sure all will agree she did a great job. She shared a bit about herself and talked about women in gaming. 40% of gamers are women! Catherine Eibner was up from Sydney and brought some great prizes with her. The Marcus Fenix figurine and signed Gears of War poster would be a prized possession for many games.  
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 4 May 2009
Welcome to the monthly VE Wrap Up, did you catch what happened in March? Well April doesn’t disappoint either:
Updated 3D control The 3D control was updated in April to bring higher performance and some added features. You can use the 3D control as a mode from the AJAX web control and from maps.live.com as well as program plug-ins for it in .net. New features included anisotropic filtering, custom DEM (digital elevation model), a bunch of useful events and more.
Using the 3D control Ricky has made a new release of his 3D flight simulator. With full source code this is a great example to check out.
Microsoft Virtual Earth staff join Twitter Twitter allows us to connect with people we’re interested in using short messages. It’s fast, it’s what your doing right now, maybe it’s telling people what you’re stuck on or what you just figured out. If you’re already on Twitter the good news is the Virtual Earth staff have joined as well, follow them today:
Chris Pendleton, Evangelist US: http://twitter.com/ChrisPendleton
Johannes Kebeck, Evangelist UK/Europe: http://twitter.com/JohannesKebeck
Jerry Skaw, Public Sector US: http://twitter.com/MSvirtualjerry
(And of coarse you can also follow my VE persona: http://twitter.com/virtualearth...
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