DeepEarth will become an innovation centre for controls, libraries and services for use on any Silverlight mapping platform. Some Background DeepEarth began as a project for likeminded developers to explore what the power of Silverlight, DeepZoom and Maps could do. Huge contributions from developers like Shaun, Rick and David created an innovative open source map control with many components. At Christmas 2008 we produced a V1 release and followed up with a V1.1, many developers have downloaded and used the control with successful results. But a few things happened in March this year which stalled the project: Microsoft released Silverlight 3 preview Microsoft release the Virtual Earth CTP Silverlight control ESRI released a Silverlight control None of these were unexpected but certainly these made me think about what would be best for DeepEarth and developers wanting to contribute to this space. Some lessons I have learnt over the life of the project: The project must be very simple to get running on your machine, tokens, source safe files and many web projects makes this tricky. For people to easily contribute a few days of their valuable time the solution needs to be easy to understand or else all effort is used in just getting to terms with the existing code. People want to contribute code, more flexibility is required in giving write access (Developer Role) Everyone's time is precious and although we enjoy coding new exciting silverlight controls it often takes a back seat to other commitments. Comm
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Microsoft Virtual Earth now has a new name (and it’s not Kumo or Kiev). First, a little background to ensure we’re all on the same page. As of yesterday…. Live Search Maps was our consumer maps offering. This is the web site you go to for maps, aerial photos, directions, searching for points of interest and creating collections of your own personal data to store in the cloud. Live Search Maps is now called Bing Maps. Bing! That’s right, you know you’re going to do it every time you see the name. Bing! I digress. Microsoft Virtual Earth was our enterprise mapping platform. This was the set of APIs you would leverage to embed maps into your web site along with overlay data in the form of pushpins, polygons, polylines, raster overlays, etc. etc. Microsoft Virtual Earth is now called “Bing Maps for Enterprise.” Now, the fun part. What does that mean for all the other properties? MapPoint Web Service will remain MapPoint Web Service. Photosynth will remain Photosynth. Well, this is a lot of work to go through each one, so I took the liberty of interviewing one of our Corporate Vice Presidents in Search, Erik Jorgensen, to discuss this hot topic. Watch this video and all of your questions about the new Bing brand will be answered.
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Bing! You’ve got maps. Microsoft today announced the release of its new search engine, Bing. As part of this, the Virtual Earth mapping platform and the Live Search Maps consumer site for location-based search and mapping that Virtual Earth powers will be rebranded as “Bing maps for Enterprise” and “Bing maps,” respectively. So what does this mean to customers of the Virtual Earth platform? Good news: not all that much,, actually. If you are using our Virtual Earth mapping APIs, you will see the Bing watermark on content starting on June 1. This is a logo change only. This update will not introduce change in performance or functionality of your application. The contract for your mapping service does not change in terms or duration. There is no action that you need to take. The API calls will not change. They will still refer to Virtual Earth and MapPoint web services to help make sure that your implementation does not break and you do not need to make changes. The API Terms of Use will be updated to replace Virtual Earth with Bing maps for Enterprise, but there is no other change to the terms. Having said that, this was not a trivial move by Microsoft. The net result for the Virtual Earth teams is that significant resources must be dedicated to updating references to the Virtual Earth brand, where they exist (web sites, case studies, press releases, etc.) with the new Bing maps brand and engaging in activities to raise awareness of this new brand. On the plus side, the misaligned branding between Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps that in the past has confused some, may now be resolved. Chris Pendleton has posted a video interview with Erik Jorgensen, Corp
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Attention all developers! If you have been following this blog for the past year and have read the write-ups on Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D running on the Microsoft Surface computing unit and wished for someone to make it easy to get started developing Virtual Earth applications for the Surface, wish no more! You can now find on CodePlex (Microsoft hosted web site for open source software) a Windows Presentation Format / Surface control provided by Microsoft partner, Infostrat. The project—InfoStrat.VE—allows WPF and Microsoft Surface developers to take full advantage of Virtual Earth 3D with minimal overhead. You can find information on InfoStrat.VE here on CodePlex, and a write-up from Virtual Earth Developer Evangelist, Marc Schweigert, here along with his Channel 9 video interview with the guys from Infostrat. Check out the video to learn the history behind the control, how to get started working with it, and see it in action. The video is roughly 47 minutes but Marc has very thoughtfully provided a timeline so that you can go straight to discussions of particular interest, should you choose. But I know that developers in the public sector are die-hards and will want to watch every minute! -=Virtual Jerry
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