If it weren't for Neil Roodyn's ViaVirtualEarth site, anyone doing development against Virtual Earth would have been at a huge loss last summer. Eventually Microsoft started doing some webcasts, but still, there was a dearth of help out there directly from Microsoft. I just got a download notification from Microsoft and it points to the Virtual Earth SDK.

Personally, I have stopped fiddling with VE since the API was overhauled a while ago. I know I have a learning curve (and my Virtual Earth on Ink app... using the old API broke with the release of the new - uggh) but am busy with so many other things. One of the things I had done in my app was discover and reuse the tiles from whatever map was in current view. Apparently you are not allowed to do that now [no comment], though there are some interesting articles (1, 2) on ViaVirtualEarth about using the VE Tile Servers (with caveats about the future availability of the tile servers).

I would love to see the local.live.com use ink. However my app has been out there for over a year and I haven't heard a peep from Microsoft about it. Oh well, it was still a really fun challenge that Neil put in front of me.

In the meantime, Virtual Earth on local.live.com has become an amazing tool! I'm a big fan of it, but now define myself as end-user rather than as a developer of VE.

Here's the SDK.

I created a scratchpad today using Windows Live Local that has a view of my house (yes my HOUSE outin the boonis in the mountain. You can actually see where my house is (though the photo must be from shortly before it was actually built), the trails into the woods. Anyway, I selected eight points on it for my scratch pad with a title and notes for each one. Then I clicked on the email function and it created an email but the link. Yikes. Was it long and filled with gook. Lori McKinney from the Huntsville .NET User Group sent me a tiny url to get to a scratch pad she created for seeing where their meeting location was, the airport and a few surrounding hotels. That's the way to go. So hopefully down the road, this [very cool application which has come  long way since Virtual Earth's release this summer!!] will enable a cleaner way to share scratchpads without having to take care of that piece of the puzzle ourselves. I sent the link of the scratchpad I created to my husband he told me he deleted it because it was filled with gobbledygook. That is going to be the typical reponse of regular users.

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Oh I hate to say this but it's true. When picking up my neice last weekend, her mother and I decided to meet halfway and find a Friendly's which would be amenable to all the kids. So I used Windows Live Local to drill into the general area and then show me all the Friendly's. There was one right in the town we were focused on. Perfect. Then I asked Windows Live Local to map it for me and give me directions. We followed the directions and ended up on the wrong side of town in a totally residential area. Rich and I drove back towards the comnercial area and just asked someone for directions. I had sent my niece the link to those same directions, so they got pretty lost as well but finally found their way.

I tried to have it locate a few other businesses that I saw when I went to the real Friendly's, but WLL puts them all in that same person's back yard.

For comparison, MapQuest couldn't find the Friendly's in West Lebanon, NH though it gives me about ten others in NH and VT. But when I typed in Friendlys (without the apostrophe), it got me there correctly.  Google got it right.

To be fair, I went back to WLL and just typed in Friendly, but again, landed in the person's back yard.

I really like the interface of Windows Live Local. Truly I do. It's very cool, how the directions pop up and you can actually go step by step on the map even. But this next step of mapping software - the sophistication of typing in a business name and expecting perfect directions (whether from Google, MapQuest or Microsoft) is just not quite there yet. I just don't want to get lost.

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I haven't revamped the code from the Virtual Earth site that I built using the first version of Virtual Earth and it seems to be quite broken now. I noticed the other day looking at someone else's V.E. site that the entire middle section of tiles was missing. The problem happens on my site as well. But worse, the functionality that I spent a LOT of hours to get working is also broken. This is the part that brings the tiles over to an inkable surface. Eventually, I'll have to retool and move it up to Windows Live Local speed. In my "free time".

Too bad I am going to be totally out of the office tomorrow. I guess I might need to attend the Virtual Earth Madness webcast!

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Here's a cool trick you can do using the new IE Developer Toolbar if you want to find out meta data about a Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local) map. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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Thom Robbins is presenting a 1/2 day seminar on Programming Virtual Earth on March 1st  in Boston and it will also be accessible over Live Meeting.

At the end of the session, Thom will announce how you can participate in the a Virtual Earth Mashup and even win an XBOX 360.

Thom will also have help from the ViaVirtualEarth's  Neil Roodyn and maybe even me.

For information on go to the registration page for the virtual event.

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Congratulations to the Windows Live Local team on being selected for an Editors Choice Award by PC Magazine!!

I had to laugh when I saw the screen shot in the PC Mag article. One of the tags is for Ft. Green Park in Brooklyn. In a former life (my 20's) I lived 1/2 block from that park.

(add'l plug for the WLL team: Want to join this "winning team"? They are hiring!!)

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MSN Virtual Earth will be renamed Windows Live Local. I guess that it won't be confused with Google Earth's name that way . There have also been some enhancements as reported by the Kelsey Group by way of Dare - better driving directions, Birds Eye imagery and user pushpins are among these.

Hmmm no word about ink though...nobody from Microsoft has ever asked me how I did it. 

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I might be speaking at some pennsylvania groups this summer for INETA. I mapped them out on Virtual Earth so I could visualize where they were relative to one another, then it was easy to share the scratchpad with the user group leaders and Nancy Mesquita who is the coordinator so they could see the same map..

Very handy.

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Note that the js controls (and commercial controls) for Virtual Earth will be moving. Here are the details.

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Many of us spent a LOT of time rooting around the damned JS files

If it hadn't been for ViaVirtualEarth, I would probably have bagged working with VE.

But now, there is an SDK. It's pretty light, but something. And there is a new search control I heard about during PDC. You can get that in the SDK area as well.

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I've been fiddling some more with Virtual Earth Ink.

I discovered that there are cases where the tiles don't get realigned before going over to the inking interface. In order to realign the tiles, I need to use the map object's SetCenter command and pass in the current lat/long values of the map.That actually calls SetCenterandZoom, before recreating the map anew with fresh tiles (in the order that I need them). This is creating a big problem for me. When I zoom, I need to realign the tiles. But in doing so, this puts me in an infinite loop. So I have to come up with another way around this. In the meantime, if you pan a bit after zooming, the pan will fire off the realignment. Then when you go to INK the tiles, they will be in correct order.

The other thing I have been playing with is setting pins upon a search, which is not a problem. However, I want to persist the pins to the inking surface. I know how to do it, but am having trouble with calculating the position. I just have to keep at it, which of course, I will.

 

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If you are planning to program with Virtual Earth, I highly recommend having a JavaScript reference handy! I have definitely been making use of  the O'Reilly JavaScript Pocket Ref by David Flanagan though it looks like I'm behind a few editions.

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Channel 9 gets the inside scoop on Virtual Earth from the VE team. Watchiing this video really opened my eyes up to the amazing capabilities of this technology. I have barely tapped it in my Virtual Earth does Ink application.

There is a website at www.virtualearthinfo.com with a compilation of links and info regarding VE. And MSN is hiring!

Posted from BLInk!

I have been working with Virtual Earth some more. I wrote recently about the tiles that make up the map image and have made some new discoveries.

When you create a new map, the tiles collection has the tiles in the order of their placement in the grid, by column, as opposed to by row, like a <table> object builds a grid. So in a map of 12 tiles, map.tiles[0] through map.tiles[11] are placed like this.

0	4	9
1	5	9
2	6	10
3	7	11

However as you pan (scroll) around the map image, VE just keeps adding tiles to the end of the collection based on your movement. Therefore, when you stop scrolling, the tiles will no longer be in any order that you can count on, which is not good if you have code depending on the above order.
To rectify this you can use two methods of the map control to jiggle the tiles back into "proper order".
Capture the onEndContinusPan event of the map and then use the SetCenter method followed by the _UpdateMap method.

map.onEndContinuousPan = function(e)
{
map.SetCenter(e.latitude,e.longitude);
map._UpdateMap();
}

I had originally tried to just create a new map when the panning ended, but I was unable (by hook or by crook) to get the compass control, zooming controls, etc to interact with the new map.
Thanks to ViaVirtualEarth for the lesson on how to capture map events.

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very nice, Dr. Neil!

www.viavirtualearth.com

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I have been experimenting with VirtualEarth to understand the structure of the map image.

The map image is made up of tiles (map.tiles). It basically builds a grid of image objects. Each quadrant of the grid is a tile and literally points to an image file (png) on the VirtualEarth website. The tile object has a lot of members, the most important one to me is the property "f" which returns the uri of the image that makes up the tile.

The tile size and number of tiles that make up the image will vary based on the zoom level of the map. Then the tiles are placed in a DIV that  has a hidden overflow which is why you can grab it and move it around within it's bounds. If you want to see this, look for map.element.outerHTML while debugging.

When you request a map from Virtual Earth, it returns the html that makes up the map. This is a DIV with a whole bunch <img> tags pointing to the various urls of the images at VirtualEarth that make up the map. For example: "http://tiles1.virtualearth.msn.com/tiles/r02211.png?g=1".

You can see this DIV within the "map.element" object.

Since VirtualEarth works out the html in advance and returns it to us, we just get back the DIV and the images with their positions. Since the solution I am working on to ink enable this stuff requires that I know how to rebuild them, I will have to create a little function to determine what the dimensions of the resulting "grid" are. I have gotten 3 x 5, 3 x 4 and 2 x 2 so far. So I can't count on a pattern.

One other thing that I can tell you is that so far I have not found any property or method that will return the image data of a tile. So after an enormous (you don't even want to know...) amount of experimentation, I have found the best way to get at this data (since I need it for my solution) is to build a web service that streams the image data back to me. Dr. Neil appreciates the irony of this, because Virtual Earth is built on MapPoint web services  - so I am writing a web service to wrap a web service!

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From Via Virtual Earth

Test the methods of the Map control

I have added this test page to the Gallery that shows methods on the Mapcontrol and how to use them.

Now all we need is for someone to do the same thing for the VE.js scripts.

Anyone feel like they want to do this?

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VirtualEarth is interesting but quite undocumented when it comes to developing against it. Luckily, Neil Roodyn (that's Dr. Neil) has had a great head start with Virtual Earth and has created the Virtual Earth developer center “ViaVirtualEarth”. There are already some articles on getting started and a ...[read more]

[A DevLife post]

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