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9 presentations, 8 cities and 9 giant tennis balls later, we've concluded our series of SQL Spatial and Virtual Earth talks.

There were a few questions that kept occuring around the funding for our "tour".  We paid for all the flights, accommodation and transport ourselves (except for the flights to the Melbourne group..which were kindly funded by the usergroup).

Then the next set of questions were around why did we do it if we didn't get paid for it.  For us, there were a few opportunities. 

• There was the fact we got to see a new new places..like Perth and Adelaide.
• We got to meet lots of people we "talk to" onlink but had never met.
• We got to talk to people about stuff that we find interesting
• We got to meet lots of people passionate about GIS, GML, community etc. When you get to talk to people truly passionate about something, it always makes you feel more energetic!

I was truly amazed by the enthusiasm of some of our attendees.

• People flew in from other cities to see the presentation. Last night, one of the attendee flew from Woolongong to Brisbane to see us.
• People made special efforts to come and see us on Valentine's day :)
• People were really keen to share their experience and knowledge of GIS, GML etc.

I think the tour really strengthened in our minds how much people identify with maps, and that there's a lot of interest out there in what both SQL Spatial and Virtual Earth can do.

It was a really good experience, and we'd like to thank all the usergroup leaders who hosted us. These guys do a truly AMAZING job or organinsing the speakers, rooms, food etc. in their own time, just for the love of it.  My hat goes off to you all!

It will be my first MVP summit next month. The summit is at Microsoft Campus in Redmond Seattle. The event sounds pretty cool with presentations and social activities.

So to contribute I teamed up with the event organisers to create an Attendee Map using Virtual Earth.

http://mvp.soulclients.com/

It is very cool to see how international the event is and just how many community focused people will be there.

Chris Pendleton announced the upcomming release of a Silverlight Virtual Earth Control with Seadragon technology at Mix during his VE presentation.

Check out the presentation, little preview towards the end with integration of other deep zoom images and video.

Also the intellisence project got mention as did my new article on what is new in Virtual Earth

After watching all the cool new stuff in IE8 and excited about the JavaScript performance improvements I thought I would I would install it today. After checking out that most sites built for IE7/FF2 combo rendered fine I flicked over to Virtual Earth and pop - javascript error on the VEAPI - "my market is not supported" .

Interesting the maps.live.com rendered but wasn't really useable - the interactive SDK, the benchmark for all things Virtual Earth failed to render also. Oh well I'll send an email off and see what the deal is. Is this only effecting me as I'm in Australia I wonder?

We received news today that old versions of Virtual Earth will be retired this year. We had already been told that Version 2 was being switched off come March 31st but the news today is that Versions 3,4 and 5 will end on August 31, 2008.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2942688&SiteID=1

Version 5 will be automatically redirected to Version 6, the current release. Since there are no breaking changes these application will simply be upgraded automatically.

For those running old versions now is the time to start upgrading. Version 6 is stable, offers some great performance features and new functionlaity.

For those looking at coding with Version 6 I highly recommend looking at Visual Studio 2008. Not only does it off great support for css and web design layout but a recent community project has added intellisence for Virtual Earth Version 6.

http://www.codeplex.com/VEJS

Need to upgrade to v6? Richard from infusion has a great article for you:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc161073.aspx

What is new in Version 6?
http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth/WhatsnewinVersion6.aspx

If you're after an evaluation developer account so you can use the Virtual Earth and MapPoint APIs, just request a developer account here:

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

The first release is out of the community project on codeplex to give native JavaScript Intellisence to Virtual Earth inside Visual Studio 2008.

http://www.codeplex.com/VEJS

Essentially this is a little bit of documentation code that you reference during development for intellisence only. The actually code is never executed rather it represents all of the functionlaity of the real Virtual Earth Javascript.

The results are awesome, no more misspelt enums or property names, no more firing up the SDK to quickly remember what that property looks like. Productivity is improved.

So whats the deal with the codeplex project? Well everytime the offical VE control is updated we need to update this helper. So we need the help of people that care to keep this upto date, many hands make light work! There is even talk of making some other languages.

Marc is the co-ordinator of this project and a big thanks for his great efforts to get this happening. Download the release today!

We've been working away on the new version of the Microsoft Australia Find a Partner site and it has now been released!

So's what's new since the last version?  The key features that the end users i.e. YOU see are:

• Upgraded the map to use Virtual Earth version 6
• You can now filter by specialisation aswell as competency
• List of partners on a pin hover now has infinite scroll rather than a next button

Our presentation at the Gold Coast .Net User group on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth has now been postponed till the 20th March.

For those that don't know I moderate the Virtual Earth forums at MSDN:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=537&SiteID=1

The forum is buzzing with questions and awesome answers from the likes of Ricky, Derek, Brian, Jeff, Roberto, Mike and many others. If you really want to know where the VE dev community is the forums is the place.

So today I came across another post asking about Virtual Earth in a Windows Forms (desktop) applications. My thoughts are, what a great opportunity for MSFT, harness the power of Virtual Earth data and services within rich Windows applications. I sure it will happen some day.

But hold on, I had the same thought over 18 months ago with a similar post on the forum. Is this not a good business opportunity for Microsoft? Are they not licensing the data to be used in this way? I don't know the answer but today we still only have a JavaScript control.

So over the period of time I've been working with Virtual Earth what is my wish list of major additions to the Virtual Earth platform?

Window Forms / WPF Native Virtual Earth control Silverlight 2.0 control ASP.NET Server Control Mobile Control API Additional Web controls from maps.live.com wrapped for developers. API for creating precise 3D animations Code Patterns  

Window Forms / WPF Native Virtual Earth control

Rather then host a web browser and deal with JavaScript let have a proper Virtual Earth WPF control with all the power of native 3D rendering and full system resources. No issues with Browsers, DOM, AJAX and JavaScript. We would integrate this control into our business applications. Programmers would code in .Net.

Silverlight 2.0 control

On the web side lets continue this with a Silverlight 2.0 control. The .Net programming model again be used. The performance benefits of this technology of JavaScript would be put to good use. Our navigation of the map would be seem less. Yes we have all seen the PhotoSynth Demos. This would provide...

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