Microsoft Certified Partner Soul Solutions
Author: Soul Solutions Created: Monday, 29 October 2007
Virtual Earth news, projects, samples and tips

By Soul Solutions on Tuesday, 15 April 2008

johnWeeGo.jpgThis example comes from Steve Lombardi's blog post last year and has been updated to the latest version of Virtual Earth at the time of writing. The code and collection was presented at the Museums and the Web conference in Montreal, Canada.

In the space of 10 minutes you can present a custom collection presented on the Virtual Earth platform within your own web site by leveraging http://maps.live.com as your content editor and storage and using the Virtual Earth API. Here we present the simple code to do this and some extra features like a map search, custom numbered icons and an outline text listing with clickable titles.

Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Wednesday, 2 April 2008

BronwenWeeGo.jpgWe're heading off to Montreal this weekend, to attend the Museums and Web Conference.  John has been going for a few years now, usually presenting on content managment, but this year he's presenting a paper: Using the Microsoft Virtual Earth API to provide Geographical Access to Cultural Heritage and doing a half day workshop: Exploring the National Gallery of Australia online database for prints and printmaking spatially.  So I'm going along to help him out a bit with the workshop. I've armed myself with art paper and texters to keep the crowd amused and bring out some crea ... Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Friday, 28 March 2008

BronwenWeeGo.jpg9 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 ... Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Wednesday, 26 March 2008

johnWeeGo.jpgIt 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.

MVP08VE.jpg

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.

By Soul Solutions on Saturday, 8 March 2008

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

VESL.jpg

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 Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Thursday, 6 March 2008

johnWeeGo.jpgAfter 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 Eart ... Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Tuesday, 4 March 2008

johnWeeGo.jpgWe 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 Stu ... Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Monday, 3 March 2008

BronwenWeeGo.jpgIf 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/

By Soul Solutions on Sunday, 2 March 2008

johnWeeGo.jpgThe 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.

VEJSIntelli.jpg

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 proje ... Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Thursday, 28 February 2008

BronwenWeeGo.jpgWe'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

MSPartnerMaps.jpg