Blogs

The folks over at Via Virtual Earth have started up a forum thread on the free-to-use, ad supported “commercial control”, trying to get feedback on what you think microsoft should do different or the same as we prepare for future versions.  If you have an opinion we would love to hear from you, so please chime in. 
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As you may have noticed already, as I have gotten a few comments, URLs that used to lead to MapPoint Web Service information on www.microsoft.com now redirect to a site branded as Virtual Earth.   What’s up?  Did we change the name of the MapPoint Web Service?  Is this a new version?  It is much more simple than that actually: We are combining our two primary services components, Virtual Earth Map Control...
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Dare Obasanjo recently posted a good article to XML.com highlighting how he built a Virtual Earth mashup for finding movies in Seattle.  It is worth a read if you are brushing up on how to bind your data to the Map Control. 
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This afternoon, Windows Live Expo was released as a public beta. It is a great classifieds site with some unique features such as scoping the posts you see to a particular area or to a group close to you like your Messenger buddy list.  Check it out: http://expo.live.com/ So, why is this on the Virtual Earth developer blog?  Well, Expo allows it’s users to map out the results of their search on a Virtual Earth map control. ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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”...
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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,...
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When we transitioned to Windows Live Local we implemented new servers for the tiles for vector, ortho, and other imagery sources.  This new setup is more scalable and better acommodates the kinds of traffic we need to handle for our own site and for our commercial customers and mashup builders.  Until now, we have kept the old tile servers running to keep our v1 mashups running.  But, alas, the time is approaching when we...
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