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3 months ago I kicked off a little experiment on twitter, http://twitter.com/virtualearth. As a Windows Live MVP I decided to tweet everything interesting I come across with Virtual Earth and also actively engage others tweeting about Virtual Earth.

This weekend I hit 100+ followers and feel I’m really starting to connect with others around the world interested in this technology. I tweet interesting Articles, blogs post and links specifically on Virtual Earth, nothing else.

Welcome to the first part in series that takes you through the core functionality of the Microsoft’s Virtual Earth JavaScript control. Through example code I hope to either introduce you to the Virtual Earth control or show you how to do things better and highlight some things you may not have known. I will be making use of the jQuery JavaScript library to provide valuable helper functions and simplify our code. If you feel there is something that could done better please share your ideas in the comments below.

Lets start by loading the Virtual Earth map on a page. Sounds trivial? Well it is, but lets do it as if you were building a real world application and include:

• Browser detection to only load the map for supported browsers
• Binding to the body onload method programmatically as you may not have access to the actual HTML tag

Wow! I can’t believe I haven’t done one of these since the end of July! Looks like I have a few months to catch up on.

• John presented at Virtual Earth Day in Brisbane on the 1st August
• We shared the Virtual Earth love with 100’s of school girls at the Technology Takes You Anywhere Event in Brisbane 22nd August
• We had our 1st Girl Geek Dinner in Brisbane
• We attended Code Camp New Zealand
• I presented at the

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The HDView team released a gem of a sample app this week from ICE that amongst other things provide a solution for showing 360 degree panoramas. The solution uses three MSI controls to provide a seamless panning experience.

Now what could be a bigger 360 panorama then the Earth itself?

So you’re interested in Silverlight and Virtual Earth, you’ve downloaded the DeepEarth code but are now completely lost? Well check out two 20min videos to walk you through the code and get you started. Part1 and Part2.

The videos essentially walk you through the solutions, pointing out what each of the projects does, the structure and how to get the right project running.

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control is not small weighing in at 217KB when compressed in Version 6.2. When you require the rich experience of Virtual Earth this size is not an issue, the control is aimed at broadband users and within a few moments of interacting with the map you can easy exceed this with the rich imagery being loaded on demand. But what if your web page only needs to show the Virtual Earth map when a user asks for it or you just want your page to load super fast? You need to load Virtual Earth on demand.

See an example here: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/examples/VE62/loadondemand.htm (view source for full code)

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control has supported tile overlays for some time. A tile layer is set of 256px square images matching the Mercator projection of Virtual Earth. Tile layers are usually layered on top of Virtual Earth, the control supports transparency and an opacity of the entire layer. With the latest release of Version 6.2 of the control you can now disable the base tile layers allowing for greater performance when your tiles are all you need. Lets look at what is required to load OpenStreetMap tiles into Virtual Earth.

VEWS was just released and after a few attempts myself to get it working I thought I would share a short video on the sign up process and adding the references to Visual Studio 2008.

Video after the break:

On the 22nd August John and I participated in Technology Take You Anywhere 2008, an event to help encourage school girls into Technology careers.  We were placed in the Multimedia space up against the dance mats, game bikes etc. We devised a bit of a game where we’d show the girls an image of a famous landmark and they had to find it using Virtual Earth, an XBox controller and help from their school mates.

My second set of videos for the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control went up today. This time we look at server side clustering. If your interested in getting a really large amount of data in the control you should check it out over at liveside.net.