A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had been looking into the possibility of adding ink to Virtual Earth and I have actually managed to do it! Because I was dealing with two technologies that require an enormous amount of server side work and that did NOT want to have anything to do with each other, I spent a lot of time working through ideas that did not pan out. Total dead ends. But in the end, tenaciousness prevailed and I have come up with a pretty satisfying solution. The toughest thing that I had to deal with was transforming Virtual Earth's idea of an image into the TabletPC API's idea of an image. I had to do a lot of extra work to stream the images and other data back and forth from the client to the server to the client. A lot of the work I have already done with Ink on the Web has proved very helpful. There is one published article called “Doodling on the Web” on the MSDN Tablet PC Developer Center. Another which I have written, demonstrating how to persist ink data in web applications in a great variety of scenarios, is getting ready to be published on the Tablet PC Developer Center as well. The ViaVirtualEarth website was an enormous help in getting my application together.
Oh, and lest I forget, here is the link to my Virtual Earth does Ink! application.