Blog List

I noticed on Tim Warr’s Blog that there’s a Virtual Earth Developer Event happening in Reading on the 19th March. We were fortunate to have one of these events in Brisbane last year and it was certainly a worthwhile event.  So if you’re in the UK the details are:

Registration here with invitation code of 3C27C2

When: 19 March 2009 9:30-16:30

Where: Thames Valley Park, Chicago 1, Microsoft Campus, Building 3 Thames Valley Park, Reading Berkshire RG6 1WG, United Kingdom

Overview: If you are a developer and want to take working with Virtual Earth to the next level then this event is for you. The first session will comprise of a platform update to bring you up to speed on the latest version of Virtual Earth. Later, Johannes Kebeck, Tim Warr and Alexis Harakis will show how Virtual Earth interacts with other Microsoft technologies to create a powerful tool that can be used for much more than placing pins on maps. Whether you need to analyse or display data, or create an immersive end user experience, this event will make you eager to get back to your PC to put the code you have learnt into...

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This week we’ve been fortunate to have been invited to present at the Politics & Technology Forum: Campaigning Online Event on Thursday 26th February in Canberra.

Event details:

Join government, business leaders and political bloggers at the second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum.

On this informative morning, Keynote Speaker Joe Trippi details the impact of new technologies on modern politics. Heralded by the US press as the man who “reinvented campaigning”, Joe has run Presidential, Senate, Gubernatorial and Mayoral campaigns. His innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and have become the model for online campaigning.

There will also be a Q&A panel discussion, new technologies will be demonstrated, and some revealing insights and statistics around Australian digital behaviour will be shared.



We are delighted to welcome Lindsay Tanner MP, Minister for Finance and Deregulation, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, Leader of the Opposition to this exciting event.



Event Location:

Parliament House - Parliament Theatrette Capital Hill, Canberra, Australia

When:

26 Feb 2009, 8:30 AM to...

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There’s a couple of Virtual Earth Webcasts coming up how a quality mapping system can help boost profitability delivered by Technical Evangelist, Chris Pendleton:

 

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) or February 19, 2009 4:00 AM for Brisbane

Show Your Retail Customers the Big Picture with Virtual Earth (Level 100)

In the retail industry, quality mapping solutions delivered by Virtual Earth help increase profitability in a challenging economy. Tighter budgets mean that retailers need strong customer connections to build loyalty, boost their businesses, and grow profits. Companies need to visualize areas of growth and opportunity and identify branches or divisions that may need special attention. Virtual Earth is a platform of integrated services providing quality geospatial and mapping data, rich imagery, and cutting-edge technology that can integrate with your existing business systems to provide unique views of data. Attend this webcast to learn how you can deliver immersive end-user experiences on the desktop or on mobile devices that connect customers with your locations, products, and services.

 

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) or February 26, 2009 4:00 AM for Brisbane

Virtual Earth Empowers Developers to See and Show the Big Picture (Level 200)

...

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This one catches out every developer when they start coding in JavaScript. The issue is that you can’t change the DOM in IE before it has fully loaded. Usually everything is fine locally and in Firefox but when you deploy you get this:





In the case of Virtual Earth it heavily changes the DOM, turning a simple DIV into the fully AJAX map control. What has happened is you have called map.LoadMap() while the page is loading, you need to listen for the body onload event, there are a couple of ways to do this:

The VE SDK simple attached in the body tag itself:

Now this is great in examples but rarely can you do this do to Master pages, CMS or other issues. Instead you can do this in code:

//the map object var map = null; //set page event handlers for onload and unload if (window.attachEvent) { window.attachEvent("onload", Page_Load); window.attachEvent("onunload", Page_Unload); } else { window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", Page_Load, false); window.addEventListener("unload", Page_Unload, false); } //load map function Page_Load() { //add your map loading code here } //Clean up all objects function Page_Unload() { if (map!=null) { map.Dispose(); map = null; } }  

Notice I also dispose the map on unload.

If you are using a javascript library like MS AJAX or JQuery they have helpers to do this also. If you want a more complete sample using jquery have a look at my article here:

http://www.liveside.net/developer/archive/2008/11/13/virtual-earth-basics-part-1-loading-the-map.aspx

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On the eve of our V1.1 release of DeepEarth I thought it would be interesting to show off some stats. First up the main page at codeplex is where we direct everyone to come and check it out, download the control and leave ideas and feedback.





What a difference releasing V1.0 made just before Christmas!

Next up is the Demo site we host for the project here in Australia.



We only started collecting stats when we implemented the Virtual Earth client token for the staging service of the VE Web Service in December.

So, what impact does 14,000+ pageviews have on your transaction count? Well I have that too:



Not as shocking as some people predicted, only 60 transactions per person. A transaction is 8 tiles or a geocode request. One issue we have made clear to the Virtual Earth team is that the unique token we append to the Tile requests means that...

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A new website http://geowebguru.com has launched from fellow MVP Richard Marsden. To celebrate I’ve created this article on 20 ways to use the Virtual Earth Platform as a developer. I cover Silverlight, Surface, 3D, Mobiles, SharePoint and lots more. I hope you find it really useful, its got a bunch of really cool links I’ve been collecting over the last few months.

View Full Album

In the comments of the article feel free to add more links or even more uses.

http://www.geowebguru.com/articles/86-twenty-ways-to-use-the-virtual-earth-platform-as-a-developer-

I came across this awesome online tool from ito! that lets you visualise the changes made to OpenStreetMap for a specific area. You do need to register and then you can select your area of interest and see the changes made over the last configurable period. For example the additions made to Brisbane over the last 12 months:

Click for full resolution.

If your interested in developing with the next generation visualisations of Silverlight on top of the Virtual Earth Web Service (VEWS) you can now download the Version 1 release of DeepEarth.

http://www.codeplex.com/deepearth/

Visit our online sample site or watch the video:

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