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ViaWindowsLive on Via Virtual Earth Blog
The new ViaWindowsLive community site has launched and features not only a definitive set of resources on all Live Services from Microsoft but also a special section on Virtual Earth including a new site gallery for you to upload your sites, new articles on Version 6, including getting started guide, an interactive quick guide, location finder and more. Subscribe to the VWL aggregated blog to stay in touch with everything Live Services related. Find all the great content from this site and much, much more. Explore how other Live Services can compliment Virtual Earth and your applications.
Version 5 URL changed - Error: 'VEMap' is undefined on Via Virtual Earth Blog
It has been reported that the old url to access the Version5 javascript for Virtual Earth no longer works. This is effecting sites worldwide.
The correct way to reference the Version 5 javascript is:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=5"></script>
If you have been effected a forum thread has been started here
Silverlight Virtual Earth viewer on Via Virtual Earth Blog
With the launch of silverlight yesterday I was digging around and found this viewer for Virtual Earth by Greg Schechter. It does use the 1.1 alpha of silverlight. It gives some interesting ideas for where Virtual Earth could be headed. Certainly the demo of the performance of silverlight compared to javascript for processing showed a significant increase. This could be very useful.
And of course on the gamer front check this out by Andy Beaulieu and shoot down some UFO's over Birdseye images.
John.
So much new Virtual Earth Imagery Worldwide. on Via Virtual Earth Blog
I subscribe to all the VE blogs and recently the posts about updated imagery has been more and more frequent.
The latest is here and for myself downunder we saw three updates, Canberra, Newcastle and Uluru:
Derek Chan posts 3 Articles in a month! on Via Virtual Earth Blog
A big thank you to the efforts of Derek Chan who posted his third VE article today (he actually had it ready weeks ago but had to wait for Mr Bottleneck here at VVE ;) )
The 3 articles are all relivant to Version 5 of Virtual Earth and deal with the Mini Map, debugging javascript and now custom pins in routes.
All these can now be found in our articles section.
If you have something to contribute send us an email.
John (The bottleneck)
Contribute
Have you done something really cool with Virtual Earth that you want to tell your fellow devs about? Perhaps you did something innovative, did something better, or even just found a better way to explain something.
Contributing an article to Via Virtual Earth gets both you and your idea visible in front of the development community. Drop us an email today if you've got an article, or are considering doing one.
All Articles RSS
Fun with IE Image Filters and Virtual Earth
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Internet Explorer offers several filters that can be applied in CSS to images. This Article is a fun look at how some different effects can be applied to Virtual Earth.
Use multiple instances of Virtual Earth V5
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
One possible application of Virtual Earth, other than the classic application of one instance, is the use of multiple instances of VE, inside one single page. With the last release of VE, Microsoft has introduced a new functionality about mouse and keyboard events. Specifically, you can use VEMap.AttachEvent Method, to synchronize one or more instance of VE with one principal instance.
Customizing Route Pushpins in V5
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Using Virtual Earth version 5.0, you can create driving routes with automatically generated pushpins along the route that contain the driving itinerary inside the pushpin bubbles. After a VEMap.GetRoute call is made in Version 5.0, a VERoute object is returned. The VERoute has itinerary directions but has no information as to the co-ordinate of the route pushpins and no access to their InfoBox descriptions. This article will discuss how to manipulate these pushpins and generate your own version 5.0 route pushpins.
Browser Debugging for Virtual Earth
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Tracing program execution and debugging code are two of the major challenges of developing JavaScript applications. These challenges are especially apparent in Virtual Earth, which is essentially a large obfuscated JavaScript library with limited documentation on available methods and no documentation on how the backend API works. An additional challenge when debugging Virtual Earth applications is deciphering all the CSS classes and HTML elements applied in order to display the Virtual Earth map. Fortunately, there are many available debugging tools that can be used to help you understand the back end of Virtual Earth applications. In this article, we will look at two popular debuggers for browsers that are compatible with Virtual Earth: the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (for Internet Explorer) and Firebug (for Mozilla Firefox).
Free reverse geocoding
Monday, July 23, 2007
In this article Mo Majad shows how to impliment reverse geocoding in Virtual Earth. Reverse geocoding is the process where a latitude and longitude pair is used to calculate the physical address, this service is not part of virtual earth and is one of the most requested features.
Customizing your own Mini-Map
Friday, July 20, 2007
The Virtual Earth 5.0 API includes a mini-map, which allows you to switch between road and hybrid display styles and shows you a zoomed out version of your current view. The purpose of the mini-map is to show you where the specific area that you are looking at is located within a larger geographic region (e.g. where a particular city is located within a state). In this article Derek show how to replace and customise your own Mini Map.
Clustering Virtual Earth on Version 5
Thursday, June 14, 2007
This article is part three in a series that explores the next generation clustering techniques for Virtual Earth. In this article I focus on upgrading to Virtual Earth 5 and using the latest Object Orientated approach to Javascript from ASP.NET AJAX. I show I better way to design your Javascript and introduce a shape differential to only add and remove shapes as required to the map.
Virtual Earth 5 Custom Info box
Saturday, May 26, 2007
With the release of Version 5 of Virtual Earth we have been given the ability to have more control of the now officially named “info box” also known as the “pin popup” or “ero popup”. This Article explores how to do this and a few of the issues still remaining.
Accessing WMS from Virtual Earth
Monday, April 16, 2007
The Web Mapping Server (WMS) protocol was developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as a standard for accessing maps over the Web. Microsoft Virtual Earth provides the ability to overlay your own maps and charts using MapCruncher and custom tile servers but does not yet support WMS directly. This article explains how to build a gateway that allows you to include WMS in your Virtual Earth mash-ups.
Clustering Virtual Earth with MS AJAX and C#
Monday, April 16, 2007
This article explores the next generation clustering techniques for Virtual Earth. We migrate to the newly release ASP.NET AJAX and migrate from vb.net to C#, we incorporate encoding of pin locations and use the power of popup content on demand to vastly reduce our data sent to the client and change our architecture significantly.
The building of mygeoland.com
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Mygeoland.com is a minimalist location search for Australia. By offloading everything to the power of Virtual Earth it provides a simple, fast and fun way to find a street, suburb or place in Australia. In this article I explain how simple it really is as we build the site from the ground up with a few div tags and a handful of JavaScript. I will then touch on some really simply ways we can optimise such a site using free third party tools and server options.
Clustering
Friday, August 11, 2006
So you have a million houses, festivals or gnomes you want to display on VE, but when you display them all at once it is messy and slow. Why not try clustering them?
Integrating Real-time Traffic Information
Monday, July 31, 2006
In the United States Windows Live Local already provides real-time traffic. The data comes from Traffic.com and is available in several Metropolitan Areas. The implementation in Windows Live Local is very nice and shows the consequences of traffic incidents and construction sites as colour-coded overlay for both sides of the street. Unfortunately we don't have these nice overlays outside the US and even if he had, we couldn't use them in a Virtual Earth custom application. So I was looking for an alternative to provide traffic data for European countries.
Roll Your Own Tile Server
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Microsoft Virtual Earth brings a whole new dimension to browser-based mapping, but it's possible to go well beyond the supplied API and get the same rich interaction with other kinds of maps, charts and graphical data. This article explains how the tile server protocol works and how to re-point the Virtual Earth control at your own tile server.
Tracert Map
Sunday, July 16, 2006
The tracert tool displays the various IP Addresses in the route of a network packet as it travels to a destination IP address from a source. In the tool presented in this article, I combine the tracert component, technology to geo-locate based on IP address from HostIP.info and the Virtual Earth API to map the locations of various IP addresses that fall in the route of a network packet when it travels to a user provided destination IP address.
Creating a Virtual Earth plugin for NASA's WorldWind
Saturday, June 24, 2006
This article will explain how to create a plugin for NASA WorldWind that will incorporate Virtual Earth's data. The benefit for WW is that VE provides a great source for maps with multiple views (road, aerial, hybrid). The benefit for VE is that WW brings the maps into a 3D world with terrain data and many other plugins for overlaying other data sources.
Upgrading Where Was Dr. Neil to the Virtual Earth Beta Version 3
Friday, June 2, 2006
Over the last 8 months my Where Was Dr. Neil page has proved to be very popular, I use a link to it as an email footer and my friends and family can always find out where I have been.
Getting Started with V3 of the API (Part 2)
Friday, June 2, 2006
In the first part of this article you learned how to add and use the version 3 Virtual Earth map control in your own web page. In this article you will discover how to use some of the other controls that make up the Virtual Earth product.
Getting Started with V3 of the API (Part 1)
Sunday, May 28, 2006
This article will help you understand how to get started using version 3 of the Virtual Earth Map Control. The map control used in Virtual Earth is a JScript control, this can be used to present a great user experience for online map content. By the end of this article you will have created a web page that displays a map control and allows for some user input.
How are you getting there? Implementing Driving Directions in Virtual Earth
Thursday, March 9, 2006
In this article we will create a popup context menu to set the start and end points for a journey. We will then discover how to build the code to allow us to retrieve the directions for the journey. Finally we will plot out the route on the map.
Creating Your First Virtual Earth v2 Page (Part 2)
Saturday, December 24, 2005
In the first part of this article you learned how to add and use the version 2 Virtual Earth map control in your own web page. In this article you will discover how to use some of the other controls that make up the Virtual Earth product.
Creating Your First Virtual Earth v2 Page (Part 1)
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
This article will help you understand how to get started using version 2 of the Virtual Earth Map Control. The map control used in Virtual Earth is a JScript control and a cascading style sheet. Together these can be used to present a great user experience for online map content.
Virtual Earth Accelerated Compass
Thursday, December 8, 2005
The commercial version of the Virtual Earth MapControl doesn't feature the nifty compass found on the live MSN Virtual Earth site. Not to worry. We've written a simple implementation of it...
Virtual Earth Commercial; What and Where Proxies
Thursday, December 8, 2005
In order to get the searches working on the Virtual Earth commercial control you will need to implement two pages on your server that act as proxies to the actual searches on the MSN site. The two searches are for are the ads (what) and the location (where).
Integrating Virtual Earth into the OS X Dashboard
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Apple's flagship operating system OS X Tiger contains a nifty feature known as the Dashboard. I thought it would be neat to have a Virtual Earth map control accessible through the Dashboard, so I went ahead and implemented my own Dashboard Widget for the task.
Integrating Virtual Earth and Ruby on Rails
Monday, November 7, 2005
It's time to once again visit Microsoft's MapSearchControl. This time, we'll be integrating the control into the current darling of the "Web 2.0" movement - Ruby on Rails (aka RoR).
Adding Your Own Context Menu
Monday, November 7, 2005
In this tutorial I'll explain how to add your own context menu (right click popup menu) to your Virtual Earth application. I have used this technique in my MapStats application.
Obtaining the Visitor's Location
Monday, November 7, 2005
In this tutorial I'll explain how you can obtain the location of the visitor viewing your page. I used this technique in my MapStats application.
Building your commercial Virtual Earth Website using PHP
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
Being a web based control you are not limited to particular languages on the server side. In this article, we implement the MapSearchControl with PHP based proxy pages.
Building a local tile cache using PHP
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
When developing Virtual Earth applications it is annoying to have to reload the map tiles every time. Want to do something about it?
Building Your First Commercial Website using Virtual Earth
Saturday, September 17, 2005
In order to use Virtual Earth on a commercial website Microsoft has provided a special "commercialized" version of the MapControl.
Creating Your First Virtual Earth v1 Page (Part 2)
Sunday, August 7, 2005
In the first part of this article you learned how to add and use the Virtual Earth map control in your own web page. In this article you will discover how to use some of the other controls that make up the Virtual Earth product.
Creating Your First Virtual Earth v1 Page (Part 1)
Sunday, August 7, 2005
This article will help you understand how to get started using the Virtual Earth Map Control. The map control used in Virtual Earth is a JScript control that presents a great user experience for map content.
How I Built the Where Was Dr. Neil Page
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The simple web page Where Was Dr. Neil demonstrates using Virtual Earth to display a set of location data that is associated with dates. The final result can be seen here.
Taking the search server side
Sunday, July 24, 2005
This article introduces a technique to bypass the security issue introduced by accessing a cross domain data source as introduced in the Finding section of Part 2 of Creating Your First Virtual Earth Web Page.