Via Windows Live

List of links to all the SQL 2008 Spatial Methods

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:10:36 GMT

I always struggle to find the full list of SQL 2008 Spatial methods for Geography when I need them so this is really just a helper post so I can find them again later but maybe it will help you also. Since they are case sensitive and don’t have intelisence I can never remember the syntax.

Route Optimization in Bing Maps powered by OnTerra’s free Stop Optimization Service

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:10:23 GMT

OnTerra is a Microsoft Partner specialized on tailored Bing Maps solutions and focussing on but not limited to tracking and fleet management. Recently they launched a free beta version of a Stop Optimization Service. The service allows you to send an unlimited list of stops for your route and receive a string with the order of the stops optimized for the shortest driving distance. Let’s have a quick look at how it works:

Bing Maps supports out-of-the-box Multi-Waypoint Routing for up to 25 stops through the method VEMap.GetDirections. However, the routing algorithm processes the stops always in the order in which they appear in the array of locations. If we want to start for example a trip in the Microsoft Office in Reading and want to visit Swindon, Oxford, Maidenhead and Newbury before we return to the Microsoft office we have to know in which order we want to visit these cities. If we just send the list in the order mentioned above it will guide us from one location to the next in exactly this order and come up with a route that is 185 miles long and takes about 3 hours and 20 minutes of drive time.

Chris Pendleton handled the technical stuff. Chris is a Bing Maps Technical Evangelist from the US. He came all the way here to do the roadshow and a session at Remix.

And finally John talked about our experience as a Bing Maps Partner.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Bing Maps iSDK today. This is a little helper function that calculates 360 points around the location provided at the given radius in KM. The co-ordinates are quite accurate and you will notice the effects of adding a circle at different Latitudes on the Mercator map.

Full source:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
   <head>
      <title>Circle Example Bing Mapstitle>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
      <script Global Mapper, SpaceBlock, Windows Azure and a few helpful tips along the way.
   
  At Bing Map’s core is the ability to render really large images in your browser. Both the AJAX, Silverlight and Mobile versions all use a concept of a tile pyramid to make this possible and effective over the web, you can read more about the tile system in great detail here. Today we are going to look at a process I use to process custom imagery to overlay Bing maps.
   
  In the GIS field these custom images are called raster images and come in various file formats like GeoTiff and ECW. These formats have the images correctly “projected” and incl

Imagine Cup 2009 – Team Croatia Builds GeoScout with Bing Maps

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:10:04 GMT

The Imagine Cup 2009 finals is in full swing. On July 3, 2009 in Cairo the winner will be announced for the most innovative project. The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition, Imagine Cup is one way Microsoft is encouraging young people to apply their imagination, their passion, and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its seventh year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a global event. In 2008, more than 200,000 students from 100 countries entered the Imagine Cup competition.

The Croatian Team consisting of Tomislav Fotak, Ivan Lozić, Marko Škvorc, Ivan Švogor integrated Deep Earth (which uses Bing Maps) into their GeoScout.net project. Check out the videos of GeoScout to better understand how they’re leveraging Bing Maps.

GeoScout.Net is a platform which main purpose is emphasizing information flows, bringing experts, organizations, societies and people together. The fundamental assumption of this platform began with e-Governance. To visualize it, you can picture a pyramid. The idea that guides us is to

TrekWireless Shows Electric Car Charging Points on Bing Maps

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:10:21 GMT

Following the announcement of the a UK-wide trial of low carbon and electric cars TrekWireless has created a map of electric car charging points (juice points) in Westminster. The infobox shows the location of electric car charging points in 360 degree POSIPIX images and through their SMS service a mobile user can request a geo-tagged image be sent to his navigation device.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,TrekWireless,POSIPIX,Virtual Earth

Spatial-Enabled Windows Azure (Part 2)

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:10:25 GMT

Step 4: Build the basic Bing Maps Application with the Tile Layer

We start by creating a new Cloud Service Solution. A Web Cloud Service will do for this purpose.

For our development and debugging we will use the development fabric but we will not use the development storage (I actually didn’t manage to get the development table storage to work with binary data types). Hence we can disable the start of development storage services in the properties of our Azure project.

Next we add a new Silverlight application to our WebRole-Project:

Let’s also create a test page and make sure that Silverlight debugging

Spatial-Enabled Windows Azure (Part 1)

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:10:25 GMT

Introduction

I have previously blogged about Bing Maps and Windows Azure (Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Accessing Blob Storage, Part 3: Accessing Table Storage) and since we brought together a mapping application with our operating system for the cloud this is already sort of spatial-enabling but now I want to go a step further. Now I would also like to use spatial data types and spatial functions as we have them in SQL Server 2008. That may sound a bit ambitious but in their infinite wisdom the SQL Server Spatial team has made the spatial data types and spatial functions available for external use in a separate library that comes with SQL Server 2008 but also separately with the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack. To be more precise you find them in the package “SQL Server System CLR Types”. Well, that’s almost all I need and with a little tweaking I can use this library in a way that I can leverage the spatial data types and spatial functions within Windows Azure.

For this walk-through I’m going to keep it simple. I will store a couple of country-boundaries in Well Known Binary (WKB) format together with business data in the Bing Maps APIs that has gained a lot of traction is the ability to overlay custom tiles atop the Bing Maps tiles to illustrate tons of data in a raster format. The ability to draw data on the map using vector graphics is all fine and dandy, but when you want to render census data, weather illustrations or even historic maps of what an area used to look like, well, browser-supported drawing techniques would pretty much crap out. So, what you’ll do is render that information prior to putting in on the map (using the Tile Pyramid Schema or Map Cruncher) and overlay it onto the map (using map.AddTileLayer() in AJAX; or, MapTileLayer.TileSource.Add(tileSource) in Silverlight) and set the opacity (VETileSourceSpecification.Opacity in AJAX; or, MapTileLayer.Opacity in Silverlight). You can put as many raster layers atop the map as you want. I found a couple applications that do just this – one using the Bing Maps AJAX Control; the other using the Bing Maps Silverlight Control. There are quite a few out there, but these just hit the web so I figured I’d call them out...

Bing Maps. Check out this list of applications:

Save Our Sounds – BBC wants you to help build an interactive map of the world. So get involved and send in recordings of sounds from where you live. Listen to the sounds of the world - and then send us your audio.

Cannes 2009 Map - Use this map to explore 2009's Cannes Film Festival in video, audio, pictures and text. Updates will appear on this map throughout the festival, which began on 13 May. Our entertainment reporter Victoria Lindrea will be sending reports by email and Twitter from Cannes, and you can also read extracts from Arts Correspondent Razia Iqbal's blog.

G20 Summit Map - Use this map to explore 2009's London G20 summit in video, audio, pictures and text. Updates appeared on this map throughout the summit, tracking both the G20 itself and the protests which accompanied it.

Olympic and Paralympic Heroes Parade<

Where Are Your Site-Visitors Coming From?

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:10:26 GMT

If you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to have a look at Worldmaps. Worldmaps determines through an IP-address lookup where the visitors of your site are located and generates various reports. For starters you can integrate an image in your website…

…but you can also get a Bing Maps application and more detailed reports through the homepage and to put it with their own words: “While it's fun to see where your visitors are coming from, it's more fun to participate in the social. See how your stats rank against your friends, and see who can achieve the highest world domination.” I’m only on rank 97 but then: I only do it for 12 days now and I’ll work on it :-)

Boston Pizza’s restaurant locator. Just enter a city and province and click “Go.” An auto-complete script is in place while you type your city – I love being lazy. Alternatively, you can enter a postal code and radius – 10, 25 or 50 KM. Note the custom numbering pushpins, Boston Pizza logo in the popup, contact information and links to driving directions and a fully detailed restaurant page complete with a menu, restaurant hours and even an RSS feed of the latest happenings.

So, Canadian Bacon in Canada....is that bacon or sausage or ham or what??? I'll need to investigate.

Multiple Bing Maps with Blacklight

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:10:38 GMT

I’ve been exploring some of the fantastic Silverlight panel systems out there and was blown away by the Drag Dock Panel in the open source Blacklight project.

See the full demo here:

http://soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/blacklight/

It is very impressive and makes you rethink how you may design your next LOB Bing Maps application. The panel system lets you add as many elements as your like and then drag them around or impressively make one larger with the other stacked up:

Imagine a tracking application where you could allow the user to dynamically add new map panes and in real time track many assets individually.

Blacklight1 episode of Expert to Expert on Channel 9 to discuss the evolution of Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth). The interview goes pretty deep in discussing how the original Virtual Earth was built based on a Bill Gates approved Think Week Paper and a production-based prototype was done in 100 days; the comparison to Google's investment in maps and data centers versus Microsoft's and how Bing Maps was architectured from the onset to scale to a massive proportion. Worth the hour of your time required to understand Bing Maps from the inside-out.

Short: Erik Meijer and I paid a visit to Bing Maps infrastructure architect and Partner Development Manager Gur Kimchi for an Expert to Expert conversation about the design and architecture of Bing Maps. It takes some rocket science to process and coerce data into accurate information representative of points of interest on planet Earth. How does Bing Maps work, at the deepest levels, in the cloud? Gur and team have created a very efficient back end system that computes and returns the information you seek when using Bing Maps. Tune in. This is yet another great conversation among experts (not including myself, of course - I need to limit my caffeine intake before E2E's going forward.

Data Visualization with Bing Maps

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:10:21 GMT

Introduction

Presenting your data effectively is often a challenging task. The most comprehensive information is usually stored in tables – often in databases. However, the more detailed this information is the more difficult it becomes to get a quick overview. There are many ways how you can provide drill downs but then you loose the big picture. Data that relates to geographies can be well presented on a map and in previous blogs I have described how to create heatmaps or thematic maps. The thematic maps sample uses the UMN MapServer to create a Bing Maps tile layer on the fly and implements a callback-function that retrieves the details for the location you clicked on from a database. In this walk-through I will have a different approach and create a static Bing Maps tile layer using Safe FME. I will also enhance the detailed view for this location by using the Microsoft Chart Controls:

My hotel customers may grit their teeth when they read this; however, while I have memberships at almost every hotel I am partial to Starwood Hotels. Ok, there, I said it. I do stay at all the others because I’m side by side with my licensing guys and they have their preferences; but, my lonely nights on the road are spent in a Starwood Hotels. Mostly because of the W Hotels brand. Pimp. Well, Starwood just launched 11 of their web sites using Bing Maps for Enterprise and the sites are as pimped out as I feel when I stay at one of their W Hotels.

When searching for hotels from their home page, just enter a city, state and or country name plus optionally dates and you’ll be sent to a hotel listing page. Atop the listing page you’ll see a link for “View hotels on a Map".” This grabs all the results from the list and drops them onto a Bing Map. Each hotel is pinned to the map with a custom rollover providing additional information about the hot

Microsoft Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) June Public Sector Webcast: Microsoft and IDV Solutions at Work for the Enterprise

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:10:12 GMT

The Virtual Earth platform - now Bing Maps for Enterprise - is a critical component of the Microsoft geospatial story, enabling public sector agencies to serve up data in a manner that allows users to better visualize, understand, and ultimately to act on them in a more timely fashion, while simultaneously cutting costs and delivering clear value to their constituencies.

Visual Fusion from IDV Solutions combines with Bing Maps, SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies to create a visual mashup platform, empowering organizations to unite data from otherwise incompatible sources - enterprise data stores, Web feeds, spreadsheets and more - into rapidly-built, interactive and collaborative applications that provide a single view of the data.

Join the Microsoft Bing Maps team, IDV Solutions and Directions Media for a complimentary webinar that discusses how the Bing Maps and Visual Fusion technologies can help you plan, predict and respond quickly, plus efficiently manage and analyze the overwhelming amount of data that flow through your agencies and departments on a daily basis.

Featuring:
Louis Effa, Director of Information Technology for the Maritime Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, will present a case study demonstrating how these technologies from Microsoft and IDV Solutions are helping the Maritime Administration to fuse data together to create models and simulations for capacity planning, economic impact analysis, on-demand forecasting and plans for mitigating and reacting to emergency situations.

This webinar will highlight how:

· Bing Maps brings clarity to business intelligence data and augments situational awareness.

· Bing Maps integrates with other Microsoft technologies to provide the visualization for collaborative, geospatial data applications.

· Visual Fusion empowers

Government Technology Article: LA County Housing Web Site Featuring Microsoft Bing Maps for Enterprise

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:10:08 GMT

Back in April I blogged on the Neighborhood Stabilization (NSP) site from the Los Angeles County Housing Development that allows residents to search for and identify foreclosure property, and that features Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth).

The application has caught the attention of Government Technology and is discussed in an article on the publication’s web site entitled “Los Angeles Fights Neighborhood Blight With Online Map.”

The article provides good background and detail on the solution and includes some good quotes from Doug Swoger, director of homeownership and preservation for the L.A. Housing Department.

A couple of my favorite passages from the article:

The map went live officially this spring, after only four weeks of development. Microsoft helped with the project.

Swoger said the HUD is considering L.A.'s map for its best practices. He said the map is saving L.A. government a lot of time and effort.

Bing!

-=Virtual Jerry

Virtual Earth (the story was submitted to EIJ prior to the Bing Maps rebranding) at work for Department of Transportation agencies in their efforts to provide better web services and travel information to citizens.

The story, which highlights solutions from KDOT as well as VADOT and includes references to many other DOT agencies using our mapping platform, ran in the printed publication as well as here on the Earth Imaging Journal website.

Be sure to check it out!

-=Virtual Jerry