IE Fan Art Gallery

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:11:06 GMT

IE8 team has put up an IE Fan art Gallery on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ieteam/ where it has posted some pictures including pictures on the theme of ‘eight’. It is also accepting fan art or image mashups to put up on IE Team’s Flickr site. All the IE8 beta testers have just been informed via newsletter about it first, so one will not find any fan art yet put up on the site.To submit

Updating Silverlight.js

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:10:46 GMT

I’m hoping this post will help explain a few things with regard to Silverlight detection scripts that some sites may be using. This is related to the silverlight.js Javascript file that was deployed with a lot of Silverlight 1.0 applications/sites and...(read more)

Live Search Maps Improves Internationally

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:10:44 GMT

Another big day for Virtual Earth in the portal space. Granted, it's our own search portals but it's great to see the platform getting more use and exposure worldwide. Live Search Maps China has expanded it's offering (just in time for the Olympics). Live Search Maps Australia just launched (shortly after we added Bird's Eye coverage for Australia).

The Live Search Maps China site (or DITU) has the following additions and improvements:

Real-time Traffic in Beijing
Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
Transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic).
Expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities.
Geocoding and Local Search
Data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues.
Support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage.
Olympic query relevance improvement
Local search category refinement
Map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.
Expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now.

Virtual Earth Based NYCT Trip Planner Surpasses 10K Daily User Milestone

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:10:50 GMT

Not too long ago I posted an entry about the adoption of the Virtual Earth platform by the New York City Transit to power their Trip Planner. The service allows visitors and residents to get walking directions for their travel itinerary within the City and, since February, features Virtual Earth maps for a much richer visualization experience.

The NYCT recently issued the below announcement boasting the success of the easy to use site due to positive customer experience.

MTA NYC Transit Trip Planner Surpasses 10,000-Daily User Milestone

Customers Appreciate Ease of Website

Trip Planner, MTA NYC Transit's online travel itinerary service surpassed a usage milestone recently, logging over 10,000 combined unique visitors to the web-based service http://tripplanner.mta.info/ and mobile service On the Go! http://tripplanner.mta.info/mobile. On an average weekday, more than 10,000 customers are planning travel itineraries through Trip Planner. The program has experienced steady growth in use since the site went live in December 2006, allowing customers to obtain travel itineraries using NYC Transit's subway and bus network, Staten Island Railway and MTA Bus.

"Trip Planner has allowed NYC Transit to expand our travel information operations to a digital platform which, in turn, has given us the ability to provide better and more relevant service to a greater number of customers than we could ever do by phone alone," said NYC Transit President Howard H. Roberts, Jr. "Customers can now plan a trip when they want - from the comfort of their home, office or even th

Zen Presentation

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:10:47 GMT

Another in a series of ruminations about how to Present Silverlight . One of the brighter Silverlight coders and MVPs asked me tonight “what is all this about your changing how you present at conferences and web casts.” In answering him, I realized...(read more)

Testing for point in Polygon with Javascript

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:10:45 GMT

MVP developer Chris Pietschmann posted some nice javascript code for determining if a coordinate is in a polygon. Chris started with code from this MSDN tutorial and focused on simplifying the polygon case. Both articles together should give you everything you need to know for drawing shapes and testing for containment in your client code. for the full spec on drawing with Virtual Earth, steal some code from the interactive SDK.

Live Maps updated in China

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:10:45 GMT

A big update to http://ditu.live.com/ went out yesterday featuring real time traffic information in Beijing and a free Send to Mobile feature for local search results and transit information. Transit info is now available in 31 cities and many new subway lines have been added for existing areas. Other improvements since V1 include lots more geocoding coverage and refreshed map tiles representing the latest vector street data. click the image below to try it out -

Technorati tags: Ditu, Olympics, China Maps

It's all about context, part deux!

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:11:20 GMT

Hi again! Here is the second part of our visit to the magical world of contexts. Yesterday we brushed on a few simple uses for them, now let's dive into a slightly more sensitive subject.

Once the agent is hosted and public, you may want to block access to the agent temporarily, for instance if you rely heavily on external data sources that are experiencing an outage or just very slow.

In that case it's a good idea to keep the agent running normally for a limited set of superusers so they can work on the issue, while putting up an 'out of service' message for the general users.

//The message is by default empty. If it's not then the agent knows that we want it muted.

variable PUBLIC.OUTAGE_MESSAGE = ""

As compared to Web sites and traditional software applications, conversational agents are subject to some unique policy compliance risks. These risks arise because:

· End users’ interactions with agents are freeform and unpredictable.

· Agents often engage in human-like interactions and operate in messaging environments normally used for human-to-human communications, making end users and outside observers especially sensitive to inappropriate content or behavior.

Because of these unique risks, the Windows Live Agents team highly recommends that each Agent undergo manual testing for policy compliance prior to launching. Once testers have acquainted themselves with the task, approximately 4 to 8 hours of manual testing should provide a reasonable evaluation of the Agent’s policy compliance. Testers should:

· Be n

How to Develop Writer Plug-ins

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:11:07 GMT

Catherine Heller (Channel 9) interviews Charles Teague (our Dev Lead) on Windows Live Writer.

Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio.

Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

How to Develop Writer Plug-ins

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:11:07 GMT

Silverlight Streaming ads pilot program has launched

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:11:07 GMT

The Silverlight Streaming ads pilot program has launched and is live in production!

A couple of weeks ago, we successfully launched the SLS ads trial (see previous references below). This means that for the very first time, we have opened up a Windows Live service to breadth developers to enable them to use the Microsoft adCenter Publisher platform. There is real US Dollar revenue associated to this pilot program. It is currently available in the US only, to people who can fill in a W9 form.

This pilot program allows you to upload video content to Silverlight Streaming and play it back with contextual ads relevant to the playback experience, based on keywords you provide at video upload time, or configure later on in the video properties. The selected participants will become adCenter Publisher account holders seamlessly, as the account provisioning into the ads platform is done directly when they decide to enable ads in their SLS-based video playback experience. This will allow them to login directly directly to https://beta.pubcenter.microsoft.com.

We are still accepting participants, so if you think this is for you, register on the web interest form, we'll process the pool of participants for the second batch of invites to the ads trial program shortly.

Previous references to the SLS ads trial program on this blog: March 26 blog post | April 29 blog post

Flash news – Camtasia Tip

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:10:56 GMT

I will come back to this but want to get it out fast. If you are using Camtasia (wonderful product) to create your screen captures and you do a lot of editing (especially zooms and call outs and cuts) you run the risk of overloading the project and causing...(read more)

Ask Maps Now Using Virtual Earth

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:10:59 GMT

Ask.com has migrated off of their mapping platform and onto Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform. If you navigate to maps.ask.com you will now see Virtual Earth (or MapPoint Web Service for those who don't have supported browsers or JavaScript is disabled).

Virtual Earth has been initially inserted into quite a few of the Ask offerings:

Ask Maps:

Business Search (City):

Smart Answers (Web Search):

SearchEngineLand | Chris P Blog] that Ask.com’s maps and directions site has migrated from an application built on deCarta’s (formerly Telcontar) mapping platform to Virtual Earth got me wondering about the future of self hosting of mapping infrastructure for high volume sites. The question isn’t if there is a future here at all, there is. In fact the Virtual Earth appliance is offered to our customers with really specialized needs (off the grid or lots of custom pre-rendered data are a couple of good cases) My question is how big this already niche market will become.

If your web based map app calls for supreme control and customization of cartography you historically would build your own cluster around ESRI’s universe of software and get to coding. For small to mid sized apps this was OK assuming you could make the development investment, but it broke down when scaling forced you to build out that cluster. this is where hosted solutions like Virtual Earth come in – you trade off a level of control (you don’t like our highway shields? sorry) for infinite scalability and performance. Both are viable models for building your app and you could go with whichever worked for you. But Telcontar was offering a third option that always seemed to me to be the worst of both worlds – the limited control of hosted with all of the hosting and maintenance costs of building your own. Not everyone agrees with me of course and that’s the beauty of our free market, but i still don’t understand why someone would go this route for core maps/route

"The Virtual Earth Map Control is HUGE!" Or, is it?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:10:47 GMT

I was at a customer location recently and they asked me, "Why is your control so big? My performance is being hurt by having to reload this huge map control every time I load my page." Hmm, time to investigate....

I opened up Firebug in Firefox and took a quick peek at the Virtual Earth Map Control...

891kb!!! Wow! That is huge. Something's wrong.

I'll give you the abridged version of what I found. Some corporate networks using proxy servers strip gzip compression. We use compression to shrink the size of the control to improve performance when distributing it to end users. If your proxy is removing the compression you get the 891kb version of the control (as seen above). The good news is most likely this WILL NOT filter down to your end users who are home using your web site - they'll be on a network connection without a proxy (or a broad proxy with compression honored); however, for your testing purposes you may see significant latency when downloading the control. You may also see a 891kb file! Don't freak out. Just send a nice e-mail to your friendly IT guys and ask them to enable gzip compression on the proxy server.

With compression, the control is sized 202kb. So, enable compression. Your network will thank you for it.

Catherine Heller has recently done an interview with Charles Teague, Lead Developer on the Windows Live Writer team. In the interview (which you can see after the jump) Charles talks about what Live Writer is, what blog engines it supports, a couple of his favourite plugins, and then moves on to a quick example of how easy it is to write a Live Writer plugin.

Of course, readers to this blog will already know how to write a cool plugin for Windows Live Writer, even having access to a template to get you going. But this is still a cool video, and it’s always nice to hear from the product team.

Anyway, enjoy the video, and thanks http://contacts.live.com; I thought it might make interesting reading for some of you so I'm re-posting it here. Let me know if you agree (or not).

-Jamie

I use Live Contacts a lot and today have been weeding my address book using http://contacts.live.com. There's some really useful bits about this service but some things behave really strangely as well. Here are some random observations:

The 'Receive contact updates' and 'Invite as messenger contact' links were showing up on many of my contacts earlier this morning. Since then I have logged off and logged back on again and those options have inexplicably disappeared

Having two profile pictures, one for Messenger and one for Spaces, gets confusing at times. I am fairly proficient in using online services and can sort through the debris to work out which each is but I imagine it must be pretty confusing for Joe Newcomer to work out why he has to submit 2 pictures and where each of them gets displayed. Is the profile picture that gets displayed at http://contacts.live.com their messenger picture or their Spaces picture? I haven't got a clue and I suspect no-one else has either.

Blog cleanup

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:11:17 GMT

I've spring-cleaned my Live Space!!!

I decided it was time to get rid of the extraneous crap that I never use because to me Spaces is a blogging platform; I have no use for it being full of so-called social networking type gadgets that no visitors to my blog care about. So, out go the photos module, my Zune Card, my Profile and my guestbook. If you want to see my profile then you can still see it here, and my Zune card is here.

I feel much better, thanks.

-Jamie

DeepZoom Obama

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:11:17 GMT
Check out this Masterpiece from Donovan West, at http://www.deepzoomobama.com/ This gigapixel (10000x10000) mosaic image was created from over 12,000 thumbnails uploaded by Obama supporters on www.BarackObama.com. It uses Deep Zoom, a cool new technology from Microsoft in Silverlight. To see Deep Zoom really shine, zoom in on Obama's left eye where you will see a thumbnail of Obama waving.

Via Windows Live

IE Fan Art Gallery

Updating Silverlight.js

Live Search Maps Improves Internationally

Virtual Earth Based NYCT Trip Planner Surpasses 10K Daily User Milestone

MTA NYC Transit Trip Planner Surpasses 10,000-Daily User Milestone

Customers Appreciate Ease of Website

Zen Presentation

Testing for point in Polygon with Javascript

Live Maps updated in China

It's all about context, part deux!

How to Develop Writer Plug-ins

How to Develop Writer Plug-ins

Silverlight Streaming ads pilot program has launched

Flash news – Camtasia Tip

Ask Maps Now Using Virtual Earth

"The Virtual Earth Map Control is HUGE!" Or, is it?

Blog cleanup

DeepZoom Obama