Blogs

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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The blog took a break for the holidays, but I (Alex Daley) am back and will be posting more regularly again.  While we were off, Chandu Thota‘s book, Programming MapPoint in .NET was published. It is a great book for programmer’s interested in doing location and mapping solutions and covers MapPoint, the MapPoint Web Service, and even has a chapter on the Virtual Earth Map Control. Programming MapPoint in .NET ...
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Our recent change of the consumer site to Windows Live Local broke some of the functionality of the Map Search Control, or Commercial Control.  Apparently when we updated the site’s URL the redirect to the new URL didn’t work for the proxy we wrote, an error that didn’t surface in our testing. So, your Commercial Control application probably needs updating.  The change is simple but necessary–you must manually...
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In v1 of the standard control, if you needed to get the bounding lat/long of the map you could do this: var y1 = map.GetLatitude(0);var x1 = map.GetLongitude(0);     var y2 = map.GetLatitude(map.height);var x2 = map.GetLongitude(map.width); There were two problems with this approach. For the South East corner it relies on map.width and height, which no longer exist in the v2 control (map width and height are...
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Just quick but important reminder note: Now that Windows Live Local has launched, if you are referencing the v1 of the standard control on the old URL: http://virtualearth.msn.com/js/MapControl.js You should update this to http://dev.virtualearth.net/standard/v1/MapControl.js This will keep your application working until you are able to transition to v2. See the original post for details. Alex DaleyTechnical Evangelist
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We will be posting a number of resources here and on MSDN to assist with migration ot the v2 Virtual Earth controls.   This post is the first of a number we have planned highlighting notable changes in the control and providing guidance on updating code.   One minor change to make note of when migrating to the v2 Standard Control is that the “onmouseclick” event is now the “onclick” event.  In...
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Update 1:  The Virtual Earth Standard Control SDK is avilable on MSDN: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4304174 The news is out: the MSN Virtual Earth site is now called Windows Live Local.  Check it out: http://local.live.com The reviews so far have been great, and it is excellent to see such a positive response from our customers.  It was from all of your excellent feedback from the first beta that we were able to build...
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To provide a stable and predictable set of tools for our developers through the future, we are moving the all controls for Virtual Earth to a new location. The original control locations will be retired in the coming weeks to prepare for changes required by the Windows Live Local announcement.  Updating your applications now will prevent these changes from impacting your applications and ensure future changes have minimal impact as well. The...
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