Blog List

We the release of Silverlight3 I thought I would share this skunk works project I have been working on. We have the Photosynth Silverlight control running inside our Silverlight3 application. We pull all the geo-referenced synths and display them on a Bing Maps CTP Silverlight control. You will see two types of icons, the big ones are clusters with many synth, zoom in till you get a smaller leaf, click on this to load the synth using some Silverlight3 magic.

http://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au/

So go and explore all the public synths throughout the world! My favourites are:

• Pyramids at Giza
• Machu Pichu Peru
• London Eye
• Mount Rushmore
• Statue of Liberty

Let me know what you think of the more integrated experience and how you think Photosynth should be better integrated spatially.

What are your favourite locations?

I’m pleased to announced my project has launched for the Azure #newcloudapp international competition. Its called Traffic in the Cloud and provides a rich interactive location twist on public webcams throughout the world.



So what makes this new and worth checking out? Well apart from the slick DeepZoom Silverlight control  (you need another reason?) here is why:

Give context to the camera images, browse by location and see what is happening live around the world. Sit back and enjoy a tour around the world. An Azure worker process caches 10 frames of each camera so you can now add some motion to your view even if the source website doesn’t. Those frames are made into a sprite as recommended by Jose Farjardo which means CPU usage and scalability rocks You can add your own cameras by signing in with a LiveID and filling out a simple form (Approval is needed before it goes live) All the controls used are available open source from the DeepEarth project on Codeplex....

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I always struggle to find the full list of SQL 2008 Spatial methods for Geography when I need them so this is really just a helper post so I can find them again later but maybe it will help you also. Since they are case sensitive and don’t have intelisence I can never remember the syntax.

STArea STAsBinary STAsText STBuffer STDifference STDimension STDisjoint STDistance STEndpoint STEquals STGeometryN STGeometryType STIntersection STIntersects STIsClosed STIsEmpty STLength STNumGeometries...

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I noticed my old code samples around the place are a little outdated so I created this little sample based off the Bing Maps iSDK today. This is a little helper function that calculates 360 points around the location provided at the given radius in KM. The co-ordinates are quite accurate and you will notice the effects of adding a circle at different Latitudes on the Mercator map.





Full source:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> html> head> title>Circle Example Bing Mapstitle> meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2">script> script type="text/javascript"> var map = null; var pinid = 0; function GetMap() { map = new VEMap('myMap'); map.LoadMap(); map.SetZoomLevel(2); } function AddPolyline() { var ll = map.GetCenter(); var shape = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Polyline, getCircle(ll, 100)); shape.SetTitle('My circle'); shape.SetDescription('This is shape number ' + pinid); pinid++; map.AddShape(shape);...

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We were at the Bing Maps roadshow in both Brisbane and Sydney, 10 and 12 June. I’ve finally gotten around to posting a few of the pictures I took from the day in Brisbane.  This year the sessions were broken in to customer and partner focus.

First up we had Peter Ulm, the ANZ Region Business Development Manager for Bing Maps for Enterprise, to do a bit of an intro and covered all the licensing details.



Then Chris Pendleton handled the technical stuff. Chris is a Bing Maps Technical Evangelist from the US.  He came all the way here to do the roadshow and a session at Remix.



And finally John talked about our experience as a Bing Maps Partner.



 

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Roadshow,Peter Ulm,Chris Pendleton

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It is actually very easy to display gigabytes of custom imagery on Bing Maps with fantastic results, the trick is to know what tools to use. Read on for a streamlined process for the common geo image formats using Global Mapper, SpaceBlock, Windows Azure and a few helpful tips along the way.



At Bing Map’s core is the ability to render really large images in your browser. Both the AJAX, Silverlight and Mobile versions all use a concept of a tile pyramid to make this possible and effective over the web, you can read more about the tile system in great detail here. Today we are going to look at a process I use to process custom imagery to overlay Bing maps.



In the GIS field these custom images are called raster images and come in various file formats like...

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I’ve been exploring some of the fantastic Silverlight panel systems out there and was blown away by the Drag Dock Panel in the open source Blacklight project.





See the full demo here:

http://soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/blacklight/

It is very impressive and makes you rethink how you may design your next LOB Bing Maps application. The panel system lets you add as many elements as your like and then drag them around or impressively make one larger with the other stacked up:



Imagine a tracking application where you could allow the user to dynamically add new map panes and in real time track many assets individually.



...

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The Microsoft Mapping Road Show is back this year with sessions in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.  This year’s event is broken into both customer and partner sessions. This year’s special guest is Chris Pendleton a Virtual Earth Tech Evangelist in the US.

We’ll be presenting at the partner session in Brisbane on 10th June and will attend the Sydney sessions on the 12th.  Hope to see you all there.

Register at the following:

Microsoft Partner Sessions: https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=324573&linvitation

Microsoft Customer Sessions: https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=383149&linvitation

 

The agenda for both sessions is similar so we’ve included the extract from the customer one below:

The Microsoft mapping team are holding an event to provide you with all the information you require to integrate Virtual Earth into your business offering. Never before has it been so easy for companies to track assets, find customers, manage a mobile sales force or to make sure customers find you before they find a competitor!

Gain real insight into how map-enabling business applications can help create customer satisfaction and an optimised organisation. If you are a technologist you’ll be amazed at just how easy it is to access and integrate Microsoft maps into your existing environment. Developers should not miss this opportunity to hear from Chris...

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DeepEarth will become an innovation centre for controls, libraries and services for use on any Silverlight mapping platform.



Some Background DeepEarth began as a project for likeminded developers to explore what the power of Silverlight, DeepZoom and Maps could do. Huge contributions from developers like Shaun, Rick and David created an innovative open source map control with many components. At Christmas 2008 we produced a V1 release and followed up with a V1.1, many developers have downloaded and used the control with successful results. But a few things happened in March this year which stalled the project:

Microsoft released Silverlight 3 preview Microsoft release the Virtual Earth CTP Silverlight control ESRI released a Silverlight control None of these were unexpected but certainly these made me think about what would be best for DeepEarth and developers wanting to contribute to this space. Some lessons I have learnt over the life of the project:

The project must be very simple to get running on your machine, tokens, source safe files and many web projects makes this tricky. For people to easily contribute a few days of their valuable time the solution needs to be easy to understand or else all effort is used in just getting to terms with the existing code. People want to contribute code, more flexibility is required in giving write access (Developer Role) Everyone's time is precious and although we enjoy coding new exciting silverlight controls it often takes a back seat to other commitments. Commercially it is impossible to use an unsupported open source control for production environments New Direction Firstly we...

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I was asked on the MSDN VE forum if the new Silverlight control had pushpins and indeed clustered pushpins. The answer is that it doesn’t have the concept of a pushpin but rather a much more flexible method of attaching any UIElement to the map.



In terms of clustering this is very possible but today I’d like to start by showing Powerlaw scaling from Lutz applied to the VE control.

Powerlaw scaling applies a scale transform to the object based on the zoomlevel. It makes the object full size at street level and tiny at world level. It produces a more realistic effect as you zoom in and out where a static sized object appears to grow as you zoom out.



The interesting part of this is it allows you to show...

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