My day in front of the computer is sometimes like the proverbial geek with remote control in front of the t.v.
Today I have been
- Exploring the possibility of combining Ink with VirtualEarth
- Reviewing some WS-Security Patterns and Practices Guidelines that the PAG team is working on that I can tell are going to make a huge (positive) impact on people approaching WS-Security for the first time
- Preparing for an ADO.NET 2.0 presentation that I am giving on Monday at Vermont.NET
- Reviewing COM Interface documentation for a possible integration for one of my clients and
- Even blogging about Tablet PC's
And the day's only 1/2 over; it's only 5:30 pm!
So 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 small gallery of some apps that people have written. Of course, the most interesting have come out of Microsoft!
There are two javascript files that are chock full of properties and functions. Dr. Neil has begun documenting them, but there is a long way to go. If I am reading the ve.js file correctly there are nearly 100 functions and properties exposed! So, I know that it wouldn't have made sense to hold up going live with VirtualEarth just to have good docs for developers. That's really just a bonus at this point!
I'm really looking forward to the evolution of the ViaVirtualEarth site.
From what I have seen, if you are not trying to do something insane like get ink onto the VirtualEarth surface, it is a very rich application and very easy to interact with. Most of the work is done on the client side, so get ready for some javascript coding! Perhaps I will do something a little simpler to start with!
And if I can ever combine the very disparate Ink functionality and VirtualEarth functionality, I will let you know.