Blog List

As part of the launch of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft has provided a number of seeding cards to selected MVPs around the world to drive the adoption of the tools and platform. We were lucky enough to receive 3 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscription cards to distribute to the community.

For his effort on the Deep Earth open source community project, we have given David Theissen (aka DotNetNoobie) one of the subscriptions.

So we’re on the lookout for any Aussie developers out there who you think deserve the other two.  Leave your comments or email us your suggestions for someone you think is worthy and why.

This year we’re back presenting at Tech Ed Australia on the Gold Coast. It should be massive this year as the event is already sold out!

If you want to see our session our abstract is below. If you want to catch up and say hi drop us a line or find us on your favourite social media platform.

WEB303 – Showcase your ideas on Bing Maps

Wednesday 25 August 15:30 – 16:45

The exciting addition to Bing.com is the new Bing Map Apps. Showcase your ideas and reach even more people by developing a dynamic solution to be featured on the Bing Maps site. Come join John and Bronwen to learn how to develop your application for this new SDK and start building yours today.

Today Bing Maps updated their base Road style tiles, the results are amazing.

New:



Old:



The new map symbology is significantly cleaner, easier to read and more appropriate for us to rendering data over the top.

We often ran into issues where the vibrate orange roads were to dominant and if, for example, we wanted to draw the user’s attention to the route of a vehicle we had to make they visualisation louder. With the new style we can be more subtle, we can use colours that compliment the users site.

Overall Bing has made a significant investment in adding some high quality to design to all of its assets. I’m very proud that the Bing Maps team have been able to take on a significant challenge like this and deliver.

View the new style yourself and see if your location is easier to find, clearer and works better for your application:

http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ 

What do you think of the new style? You can reach me on http://twitter.com/soulsolutions

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Symbology

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Yesterday Bronwen and I introduced 500 Brisbane schoolgirls to the Microsoft Surface and taught them some geography via a simple game using Bing Maps, you can read about the event and their reactions here. In this post I’d like to share some more technical information about the application itself.



The game is a simple find the location as a fast as you can geography challenge. It is effective with a large group as the they can combine their knowledge and help each other to find the location. The locations themselves are famous landmarks represented by real life replica pencil sharpeners, we have stuck a Surface tag on the underneath of each so the table can see them. To win the game you zoom into the location as close as you can, around the physical object a circle appears with your time and indicates red if your not even in view or green when it is. When you when the Circle is yellow and the time stops. I think we need to launch some serious fireworks and add some sound in the next version.



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Yesterday was Brisbane’s annual Technology Takes You Anywhere (TTYA) event at Brisbane North Institute of Tafe. The event brought together 500 schools girls aged between 8 and 15 to participate in workshops, lectures and hands on activities. The event is aimed at increasing girls' interest in technology and their confidence with using it.

 



Soul Solutions, in our third year of supporting the event, provided an opportunity for the girls to experience a Natural User Interface (NUI) via a Microsoft Surface table. Building on our successful geography games from previous years we created a new Surface game to locate famous landmarks around the world. Some of the girls attending for their third year in a row recalled our previous efforts navigating the globe on a projector with an xbox controller or flying around by shifting their weight on a wii fit controller.



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After our talk at Remix in Melbourne yesterday, I thought I’d post about how to create the Imagine Cup Game Design Round 2 competitor Mash-Up.  Before I created the application I created my own database and table with all the Round 2 contestants and geo-coded their country locations. Since the six finalists have been announced I thought I’d expand it a bit and show those in a different colour. We’ve deployed the final copy to http://imaginecup.soulsolutions.com.au/



I created a Silverlight Application Called Imagine Cup. Then I created a simple Linq to SQL class to get my team table and created a service method call GetTeams

[OperationContract] public ListTeam> GetTeams() { var db = new DataClassesDataContext(); return db.Teams.Where(a => a.Latitude != null).ToList(); } In the ImagineCup Project we add a reference to the following:

Microsoft.Map.MapControl Microsoft.Map.MapControl.Common In the MainPage.xaml we add the mapcontrol namespace:

xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl" and add the map control to the grid:

m:Map...

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We’re fortunate enough to be presenting at this year’s Remix in Melbourne. This year it’s a 2 day event with lots of great speakers so should be an awesome event.  The abstract for our talk this year is:

Mash in and Mash up with Bing Maps Silverlight

Explore the latest in Silverlight innovation with Bing Maps, birdseye, streetside, WorldWide telescope and Photosynth. Learn how to mash up you data into the seamless spatial canvas and discover how Twitter, Flickr, foursquare and more are mashed into Bing.

The agenda, session details and speaker info is up on the Remix site and early Bird pricing is still on so head over and register here and grab your ticket for just $195!

Technorati Tags: Remix,Bing Maps,Photosynth,Twitter,Foursquare.

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The MultiScaleImage control in Silverlight 4 can now optionally be hardware accelerated. This means those massive images or, in my case, maps of the world can be smoothly rendered by using your compatible video card to do the heavy lifting. So what difference does it make? Let’s take a look, my example went from 40-80% cpu usage to 5-10%!



Take a spin of the hardware accelerated version here. Mouse wheel to zoom. If you right click you can even install out of browser.

What steps do we have to take to make this happen? First we have to enable the cachemode on the MSI control itself:

Then for the browser app we add a param to the plugin:

For “Out-Of-Browser” it is in the advanced options in the silverlight project:

 

Download the full source here.

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At MIX10 yesterday Microsoft announced the developer story for Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and XNA. I couldn’t help but take an hour last night to see if I could could get Bing Maps Silverlight running. Unfortunately that didn’t get far, you see it is not the complete Silverlight 3 package we run in today’s browser. Notable:

No Browser, these are native apps so if you rely on Browser functions your DLL will not run. The current Silverlight Bing Maps control was not going to work today. No pixel shaders and some other goodies. Extra bits for interaction and cool phone functionality. So after downloading the complete developer package to an old laptop I set to work to quickly see if I could get the DeepEarth map control and providers up and running.



The OpenStreetMap provider.

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Earlier this month at Australia’s first Silverlight Code Camp I showed a simple invert pixel effect applied to the base road map layer of Bing Maps. At the time I challenged the audience to look at pixel shaders to further customise and integrate Bing Maps into their applications. Today Nokola posted a sample Hue Shift pixel shader with source code.





http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/hueshift/

I couldn’t help but quickly apply the effect to the Bing Maps control with some nice results. Rather then apply to the whole control I’m applying the shader in code to just the base layer, this means that pins and navigation controls are not effected:

effect = new ShiftHueEffect(); map.Mode.Content.Effect = effect; map.ModeChanged += (e, o) => map.Mode.Content.Effect = effect; The ultimate for me would be a shader that allowed the designer to selectively change the key base layer colours to those of their choosing. Thanks to Nokola I think I now know the right direction to take.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Pixel Shader,Silverlight

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