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More VE Reading and Viewing and links on Virtual Earth Team Blog
GeoPlace has a Quick Take review of Virtual Earth from Malcolm Williamson form the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at U Arkansas. Some good insight here, especially for developers looking to get started with the VE SDK. Tarantino and Rod...Interesting Look at How Virtual Earth's Birds Eye Imagery is Captured on Virtual Earth Team Blog
Last week, the Gadget Show on Five in the UK broadcast a look at how Birds Eye Imagery is acquired for Virtual Earth. You can have a look at a 2 page summary of the segment on their website and you can view the 3 minute video here. For a general a...Winners of MSR Research Grants in Remote Sensing and Digital Geography Announced on Virtual Earth Team Blog
Yesterday Microsoft Research announced the winners of the 2007 academic research grants. Here is the press release about the program, for which over a million dollars was awarded to researches in 2 broad areas - Real time/real world data acquisit...Recent Articles RSS
Fun with IE Image Filters and Virtual Earth
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
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
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
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
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.
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ViaWindowsLive
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
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
Monday, October 15, 2007
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
Thursday, September 6, 2007
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.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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!
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
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)
Microsoft Announce Intermap Technologies for highly accurate and up-to-date elevation data for all of Great Britain
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The announcement details the integration of Intermap Technologies' highly accurate 3D elevation data into Virtual Earth starting with Great Britain.
"This is a fundamental change for the industry as Microsoft raises the bar for accuracy and realistic 3-D experiences," said Eric DesRoche, senior vice president of automotive and consumer electronics at Intermap. "While an accurate visualization application is important to deliver to consumers, our relationship with Microsoft begins to pave the way for the delivery of additional value-added products for the business and consumer markets within Great Britain, Europe and the U.S."
Gallery Additions
Saturday, June 16, 2007
This week we have a had a few additions to our Virtual Earth Gallery, the US Open map from Naviciti shows us how useful Virtual Earth can be for an event while ShareMyRoutes.com show us what a second generation VE site can look and feel like. The is a awesome site that every VE should take a look at, you will take away at least two or three well implimented ideas. The site is running Version 5 of Virtual Earth.
If you have a Virtual Earth site that you want people to know about, submit it to the gallery.
Virtual Earth 5 Article Published
Thursday, June 14, 2007
We released the long awaited article on clustering Virtual Earth with the latest Version 5 of the API today.
This third installment covers the upgrade to version 5 and reworks the Javascript as ASP.NET AJAX classes
The pins load content on demand and a new shape differential logic removes the flicker effect from previous articles
If you have an article to submit send us an email to articles@viavirtualearth.com
Sample code for drawing in VE Version 5 posted in the wiki
Monday, June 11, 2007
Some kind sole posted a great piece of sample code showing how to enable drawing of points, lines, polygons and even circles to the VE wiki.
http://www.viavirtualearth.com/wiki/Drawing-Tool+for+VE+v5.ashx
All you need to do is put the code into a htm file and js file and your away!
Great stuff, and remember to let me know who the contributor is, I promise the new wiki upgrade will keep track of the users that submit posts but for now include that in your entry.
John
VE article in .NET mag
Friday, June 1, 2007
Our friend and regular contributor Rob Blackwell has written a Getting Started with VE article for .NET Magazine.
If you prefer to do your reading the old fashioned way (on paper) then get your hands the latest issue.
Great work Rob!