Blog List

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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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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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.

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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If you’re in London this Thursday you can’t miss Johannes and Simon presenting on Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008 Spatial. It sounds like an awesome event, I wish was I was there.



Come along to the SQL Usergroup hosted by Microsoft on the 16th April for a great evening focusing on spatial data and how you can integrate virtual earth and SQL Server to do some amazing things. Virtual Earth provides great features for visualising, performing routing and locating places, SQL Server allows for data to be stored, searched together they provide a great solution. To register go to http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/155/Using-Spatial-Data-in-SQL-Server-and-Virtual-Earth-Evening-Event.aspx   (If you can’t make the evening we are doing the same thing in the afternoon http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/154/Using-Spatial-Data-in-SQL-Server-and-Virtual-Earth-Afternoon.aspx )

This evening will be hosted by Johannes Kebeck and Simon Sabin

Agenda 18:00 - 18:30 Meet & Greet 18:30 - 18:40 Intro, what’s in the news, Q&A. 18:40 - 19:40 End to End Spatial Data with Johannes Kebeck

...

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This is a simple list of the various resources available for your development needs.

Sign up for you developer account here:

https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup

Official Microsoft:

Virtual Earth API on MSDN Virtual Earth Interactive SDK Virtual Earth Forum on MSDN Microsoft MapPoint Web Service API on MSDN Silverlight Control CTP VIRTUAL EARTH SERVICE API TERMS OF USE Geographic Coverage Details Streetside Technology Preview Windows Live Maps for Mobile SQL Server 2008 Spatial Forum Community sites:

Follow me on twitter for latest VE news as it happens: http://twitter.com/virtualearth

Liveside.net - great news and articles about windows live Geoweb Guru - news and in depth Geo Articles MP2K - the magazine for MapPoint Community Projects:

WinForms Control - A must for anyone looking at using VE in a windows forms app. Silverlight Control...

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Today the Virtual Earth team announced the new version of the 3D control. To install simple goto to http://maps.live.com/?mkt=en-us and click on the 3D button. Checkout New York rendering very quickly with trees and weather! I noticed a new 3D option also “Use ansiotropic filtering”.





The full list of new features for the 3D control from NikolaF (you should subscribe to the VirtualEarth3D blog for everything VE3D):

Initialized event A new event on RenderEngine that simplifies the startup scenario.  Check out SimpleForm to see it.  Remember that use of this event or FirstFrameRendered is now required!

Anisotropic Filtering Greatly improves the appearance of terrain when at an angle.  It's off by default, since there are some graphics cards that don't play nice with it (usually old and rare, but still).  You can turn this on through the website in the options box, or you can set it programmatically.  See SimpleForm.

Dem Data The ability to supply custom DEM data, and have it automatically stitched into existing data.  Previously DEM datasources did not work very well, mostly because we did not automatically stitch. ...

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Keith posted this awesome Silverlight3 demo showing that although the new Virtual Earth control is Silverlight2 you can happily put this in the newer framework. With this in mind I put together this little sample showing how you can use the new Pixel Shaders to drastically modify the map control. The sample makes use of the http://wpffx.codeplex.com/ project as described by Morten Nielson.

View Full Album



View the live demo here if you have Silverlight3 running on your test machine:

http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/VEPixelShader/

My favourite is the Zoom Blur, it would be interesting to enable this during zoom animation.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth,Silverlight,Pixel Shader

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For Girl Geek Dinner 5 in Brisbane we’re fortunate to have Tracy Whitelaw as our guest speaker who will talk about women in gaming which is very appropriate for our Girl Geek Guitar Hero night!  If you haven’t signed up for the event you can register here: http://girlgeekdinnersbrisbane05.eventbrite.com/

Tracy Whitelaw is a self-confessed geek and gadget girl who creates robot brains in her position as the Chief Knowledge Engineer at artificial intelligence company 'MyCyberTwin'. Based on the Gold Coast, Tracy works in an environment that delivers fully customised personalities and characters to a number of companies and businesses including NASA, AMP, NAB, PBL Media and others.

Holding a BSc(Hons) degree in Behavioural Science, Tracy has long had an interest in the social construction of identity in popular media forms. She specializes in studying trends in society, how individuals act within a social milieu, and in helping MyCyberTwin technology be rich in response to these patterns. She has been involved in online technology for a number of years.

Her particular areas of specialisation are online worlds, gaming, character creation and formation of identity in popular culture.  With a passion for emerging technology and how it is used, Tracy enjoys the challenges of creating engaging characters who keep users entertained and informed. She combines this with her interest in video-games and gaming culture, working voluntarily as the PA for a number of female based gaming websites. She writes freelance for a number of online and print sources, primarily...

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Shown at Mix last month in Chris Pendleton’s introduction to the new CTP Silverlight control this demo adds a set of simple polygons representing most of the countries of the world to the map, colouring them based on their Carbon emissions in 2004, green is comparatively good while red is bad.

View the live demo here.



The data itself comes from a SQL 2008 spatial database, you can setup the data yourself if you like by following the steps outlined in this previous article or simple download the database backup below.

For something a little special and in the spirit of the rich media support of Silverlight if you roll over the USA or Australia the Brush will use a video.



The code is pretty straight forward but their are some tricks in regards to simplifying the geography out of SQL for performance, ripping all the individual polygons out of each country and encoding them into something fast and small to send over the WCF service. The issue is we don’t have any support...

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