Blog List

We’re fortunate enough to be presenting at this year’s Remix in Melbourne. This year it’s a 2 day event with lots of great speakers so should be an awesome event.  The abstract for our talk this year is:

Mash in and Mash up with Bing Maps Silverlight

Explore the latest in Silverlight innovation with Bing Maps, birdseye, streetside, WorldWide telescope and Photosynth. Learn how to mash up you data into the seamless spatial canvas and discover how Twitter, Flickr, foursquare and more are mashed into Bing.

The agenda, session details and speaker info is up on the Remix site and early Bird pricing is still on so head over and register here and grab your ticket for just $195!

Technorati Tags: Remix,Bing Maps,Photosynth,Twitter,Foursquare.

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The MultiScaleImage control in Silverlight 4 can now optionally be hardware accelerated. This means those massive images or, in my case, maps of the world can be smoothly rendered by using your compatible video card to do the heavy lifting. So what difference does it make? Let’s take a look, my example went from 40-80% cpu usage to 5-10%!



Take a spin of the hardware accelerated version here. Mouse wheel to zoom. If you right click you can even install out of browser.

What steps do we have to take to make this happen? First we have to enable the cachemode on the MSI control itself:

Then for the browser app we add a param to the plugin:

For “Out-Of-Browser” it is in the advanced options in the silverlight project:

 

Download the full source here.

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I was fortunate enough to be invited by Catherine to be part of the first Australian DigiGirlz event, held at the Microsoft Office in Sydney, on 24th March.

DigiGirlz events have been held in multiple locations worldwide and a specifically designed to provide high school girls with a better understanding of what a career in technology is all about.

The morning started with 120 girls arriving at the office and opening their gift bag containing a few items including a copy of Tech girls as chic! (not just geek!)   and a Bingo card that was a great ice breaker for the girls to talk to not only Microsoft staff but students and teachers from other schools.

I ran the Photosynth/Deep Zoom lab for the day. The girls really just “got it” straight away and seemed quite content browsing through the synths...

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This month we're fortunate enough to have Tammy Halter as our guest speaker. Tammy Halter is the founder and sole Director of two technology companies, Absolute Data Group, and Broadcaster Media. Tammy has over 15 years experience in the information technology field, including SGML/XML publishing and document management experience with various software integration companies. Tammy has been a technical trainer, support engineer and project manager for several SG/XML software Distributors over the years, including the Frame Product Engineer, Asia Pacific & Latin America for Adobe Systems in 1997.



The path to being a Geek, does not have to start with a Degree in Technology. It's never too late to get into the tech industry, more than 1/2 of my staff  (including myself), started out in another industry and "changed over" to a career in the dark side (I.T.)!

We need to encourage and educate young women and have them understand that there are many aspects to the Technology Industry's, and you don't necessarily have to be a Programmer or a Scientist to have a love for the industry and to be a geek at heart.

Who is invited?

If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women in...

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At MIX10 yesterday Microsoft announced the developer story for Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and XNA. I couldn’t help but take an hour last night to see if I could could get Bing Maps Silverlight running. Unfortunately that didn’t get far, you see it is not the complete Silverlight 3 package we run in today’s browser. Notable:

No Browser, these are native apps so if you rely on Browser functions your DLL will not run. The current Silverlight Bing Maps control was not going to work today. No pixel shaders and some other goodies. Extra bits for interaction and cool phone functionality. So after downloading the complete developer package to an old laptop I set to work to quickly see if I could get the DeepEarth map control and providers up and running.



The OpenStreetMap provider.

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For our first Girl Geek Dinner of 2010 we're going to have a casual networking night.

We'll be heading to Vapiano restaurant in Albert Lane just off the Queen Street Mall.  You can have a look at the food on offer at there website : http://www.vapiano.com.au/our-food.html

Details for the night:

when: 7pm 23 February, 2010

where: Vapiano - Albert Lane, just of the Queen Street Mall

Who can attend: Any female in the IT industry or who has an interest in the industry, or any male invited by an attending member

Earlier this month at Australia’s first Silverlight Code Camp I showed a simple invert pixel effect applied to the base road map layer of Bing Maps. At the time I challenged the audience to look at pixel shaders to further customise and integrate Bing Maps into their applications. Today Nokola posted a sample Hue Shift pixel shader with source code.





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

I couldn’t help but quickly apply the effect to the Bing Maps control with some nice results. Rather then apply to the whole control I’m applying the shader in code to just the base layer, this means that pins and navigation controls are not effected:

effect = new ShiftHueEffect(); map.Mode.Content.Effect = effect; map.ModeChanged += (e, o) => map.Mode.Content.Effect = effect; The ultimate for me would be a shader that allowed the designer to selectively change the key base layer colours to those of their choosing. Thanks to Nokola I think I now know the right direction to take.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Pixel Shader,Silverlight

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Nicolas Boonaert’s book on Bing Maps has been released and it looks awesome! Nicolas lives in France and is an active developer in the Bing Maps community.



The book is in French, but amazingly I can still understand much of it :) It covers quite a bit in 450 pages:

History, including TerraServer, MapPoint Web Service and Virtual Earth Architecture of the platform AJAX control Silverlight Bing Maps Web Service Building Mobile applications 3rd Party Projects, including DeepEarth Comparison with Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and OSM. If your interested in Bing Maps or web mapping in general and can read French this is a must. If you don’t speak French but this sort of title interests you, then ping Nicolas and encourage him to do an English translation, he is on twitter here. Great work Nicolas!

Technorati Tags:...

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Good news for all Bing Maps developers with windows update 979202 solving a major performance issue.

CPU usage is high when you use the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight 3. This problem occurs when the Deep Zoom feature cannot load or decode a tile. The problem persists even if you minimize the Web browser in which the Silverlight 3 application is running.

This would occur if you had either :

1. a custom tile layer that would return 404 errors when tiles were requested (typical for a simple file system on edge tiles that don’t exist but are still requested by the control) or
2. if you disabled the coverage map of the base layers and zoomed into the non-covered area.

Additionally my tests prove that an additional problem with animations causing the MSI control to redraw have also been solved.

This is great news and allows us to do some clever things with dynamic tile layers and animated icons on the map without major performance hits. I hope to share some of these with you in coming posts.

To finish up the year we’re presenting at the QLD MSDN Usergroup to show off a bunch of Silverlight 3 features like perspective 3D and Deep Zoom and combine these with Dallas, Pivot, PhotoSynth and Bing Maps.

The official blurb:

Data Visualisation with Silverlight 3

To finish up the year come join Windows Live Platform MVPs Bronwen and John for a festive drink and a look at how you can visualise your data on the web using Silverlight 3.  We will explore some of the many controls available including the new Bing Maps control giving you some great ideas for your next project.

Date and Time: 8 December, 2009 17:30 for 18:00

Location: Microsoft Brisbane Office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane.

RSVP: mike@fitzsimon.com.au