Blog List

On the eve of our V1.1 release of DeepEarth I thought it would be interesting to show off some stats. First up the main page at codeplex is where we direct everyone to come and check it out, download the control and leave ideas and feedback.





What a difference releasing V1.0 made just before Christmas!

Next up is the Demo site we host for the project here in Australia.



We only started collecting stats when we implemented the Virtual Earth client token for the staging service of the VE Web Service in December.

So, what impact does 14,000+ pageviews have on your transaction count? Well I have that too:



Not as shocking as some people predicted, only 60 transactions per person. A transaction is 8 tiles or a geocode request. One issue we have made clear to the Virtual Earth team is that the unique token we append to the Tile requests means that...

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We’re pleased to announce that we’ll be presenting on Windows Azure at the QLD MSDN User Group in February.  It’s been awhile since we last presented to the local .Net Usergroup so we’re looking forward to catching up with the Brisbane developer community.

Details for the presentation:

When:Tuesday 17 February, 2009  - 17:30 for 18:00 start

Where: Microsoft Brisbane Office – Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle Street, Brisbane.

RSVP: email to mike@fitsimon.com.au

 

Windows Azure: A developers introduction to coding in the cloud.

Join Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien, Windows Live Platform MVPs, for a developers introduction to cloud based development with the new Windows Azure platform.

We have filtered through the sales and marketing material to present to you why a .net developer should care about Azure and why you should build your first cloud based application today.

Get everything you need to start as we explain what Azure is, what is ready to use and explore some of the potential applications best suited for deployment in the cloud. Be prepared for some live...

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A new website http://geowebguru.com has launched from fellow MVP Richard Marsden. To celebrate I’ve created this article on 20 ways to use the Virtual Earth Platform as a developer. I cover Silverlight, Surface, 3D, Mobiles, SharePoint and lots more. I hope you find it really useful, its got a bunch of really cool links I’ve been collecting over the last few months.

View Full Album

In the comments of the article feel free to add more links or even more uses.

http://www.geowebguru.com/articles/86-twenty-ways-to-use-the-virtual-earth-platform-as-a-developer-

Just before Xmas I bought Pro LINQ. I’ve been doing quite a bit of LINQ lately and just wanted to be able to sit down and read in one hit “the whole story” to make sure I wasn’t doing things the wrong way.

One of the reasons I bought this book over the others is that “it’s all about code”. You could spend chapters writing all the different combinations you can do something, or you can just write a bunch of code that just explains it. I’ve read selections of chapters (I skipped the LINQ-XML as I’m not really using that at the moment) and skimmed all the code and overall found the book really good to give that overall story that you usually miss when you read bits of info on 100 different sites. I also think the book would also be useful for those starting out and wanting a good reference to get their heads around LINQ.

Beginning of this year we said goodbye to the cardboard 10 trip tickets on buses and hello to the new “Go Card”. I put off using the new Smart Card for a number of reasons but have been using it solidly for a few weeks now and there’s lots of room for improvement. The best thing about the card is you don’t have to have multiple tickets that work in various zone combinations, instead it charges you the appropriate amount based on your travel and you continually top up your balance. My biggest issue with the whole system is pretty much having to check your history online to ensure you’ve been charged the correct amounts. Most of the time it’s hard to see the quick flash of balance and charges are you’re propelled out the back door with 40+ other passengers behind you.  So for now I’ll just leave my whinges about the site itself.

 

Managing your Go-Card site Firstly the Translink site haven’t set up both “A” records in their DNS and IIS (or other web server) i.e.  http://www.translink.com.au/go works just fine but if you use http://translink.com.au/go you end up on your favourite search engine screen. I’m constantly surprised by the number of sites that don’t do this. Maintaining your go card – to login you have to enter the 16 digit number of the card. I seem to be a little dyslexic with numbers so I find this annoying. Can’t I just set up a username and have my card/s linked to that? Exporting your data –...

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I’ve been having a good play with Windows7 since the beta was released and made a little video of the various new features and screens, but it was so boring I won’t put you through it. However so not to waste the effort completely I parse the video into frames and created a “tribute to the betta fish” mosaic:

The New Year started well when I received the following email:

Dear Bronwen Zande,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

So I’m back for another year as a Live Services Platform MVP

One of the things we wanted to achieve over the Xmas break was to revamp our website. Our basic site we’d put together rather quickly over 2 years ago and was looking very tired. We made a conscious effort to invest the time and money to get a fresh, new look. After spending the last few days on re-skinning we’ve released our first cut. We’ve got lots of little things left along with lots of content and ways to improve the site.

AndreaMosaic is an amazing tool for creating images from lots of other images, DeepZoom composer is a tool for publishing large images on the web from Microsoft and Seadragon AJAX is one way to view these massive images with no plug-ins at all. What do these three things have in common? They work seamlessly together and they are all free.

Lets go through step by step how to create your first Seadragon AJAX AndreaMosaic.

I came across this awesome online tool from ito! that lets you visualise the changes made to OpenStreetMap for a specific area. You do need to register and then you can select your area of interest and see the changes made over the last configurable period. For example the additions made to Brisbane over the last 12 months:

Click for full resolution.