Today, the Virtual Earth team released a new Technology Preview of street-side imagery.  Take a look: http://preview.local.live.com/ This release is not a final product, and is being released early in the development process so we can engage with the community and gather feedback on the feature concept and our implementation.  We plan to integrate a more complete version of the functionality into the Windows Live Local...
Read More

The Virtual Earth team is pleased to launch a preview of a new feature we have been working on – interactive Street-side browsing. You can try it out at http://preview.local.live.com Street-side imagery allows you to drive around a city looking at the world around you as if you were in a car. But unlike the real world, you can stop your car anywhere you like and rotate your view around 360degrees. Currently we have street-side imagery for...
Read More

We noticed that a lot of you are looking for movies currently in theaters.  To help get you the info you want faster, we recently launched an instant answer for movie showtimes! We worked with our buddies in MSN Movies to bring you current showtimes for movies near you.  You can search for movie names or the theater down the way: Movies: eight below, curious george Theaters: landmark metro cinemas seattle, amc fenway 13 boston You can...
Read More

A common question we get is, “What is the resolution or scale at a particular zoom level in Virtual Earth or Windows Live Local?”  Well, that is actually a little more complex of answer than you might expect.  We use Mercator projection across the maps in the Virtual Earth Map Control so they can be be cut up into image tiles for quick delivery to clients and reliable stitching back together of the images.  But...
Read More

When instantiating the Map Control, you have the option to specify a starting coordinate set and zoom level for road or aerial view. But, you might be scratching your head on exactly what zoom level to start at if you want to get a particular level of detail.  I find the quickest way to find a good zoom level is to fire up Windows Live Local and get the view to exactly where you would like to start your map.  Then, you can generate a...
Read More

This past December we quietly made a change to the way people search on Microsoft.com –  Microsoft.com Search is now powered by MSN Search.  This was an exciting project to work on.  We were super jazzed that another team wanted to use our search technology and the Microsoft.com team was equally excited to be upgrading their search to the best Internet Search technology that Microsoft has to offer.  Not only that...
Read More

Earlier this week we launched MSN Search and Win. It’s a contest that will be running through April and you have the opportunity to win some pretty great prizes. I like it because it’s easy. As you search on our main site (or through the flash interface) you have the ability to win prizes. If you’re not interested in the prizes then you can ignore the ads.Why are we doing it? Well there certainly are a number of people who have...
Read More

When you look at all the data about all the Olympics, as we did to add 350,000 facts about the Olympics to MSN Search, there are plenty of surprises. Sports you never heard of, countries that don’t exist, and an intricacy that defies easy understanding are all waiting for the Olympics data explorer. Architecture, town planning, painting, music, and sculpture all had Olympic medals once upon a time. The U.S. won these art competitions only...
Read More

As many of you have pointed out to me, the v2 control does not support firefox as well as the Windows Live Local site does.  There is actually a wedge you can put in place to fix most of these issues, but it is not officially part of the SDK today. To use the wedge, add the following line to your html as the first line in the body element: <![if !IE]><script src=”http://local.live.com/JS/AtlasCompat.js”...
Read More

Steve over on MSN Spaces, one of product PMs who blogs all things Windows Live Local and Virtual Earth, has added some developer information to his stash of normally end user oriented stuff.  He wrote a great 3 part tutorial on AJAX and VE dev.  Here is his description of the three parts: Part 1 – Basic mapping application built with the Virtual Earth Control. Pan and zoom with the onscreen compass, Mouse wheel,...
Read More