Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog

There are certain areas of the world where Virtual Earth's imagery is, well, low resolution. Let's face it, the world is a huge place and Virtual Earth just having had it's 3rd birthday is only in the initial phases of rolling out imagery and photography...

Just another friendly reminder that we're going to deprecate a couple older version of Virtual Earth - specifically, v3 and v4 are going down August 31, 2008 September 22, 2008. Don't say I didn't tell you so, because I've warned you a couple times now...

The European Environment Agency and Microsoft have teamed up to launch a new campaign to monitor the quality of bath water across Europe - Eye on Earth Water Watch . OMG - what is going on in Europe that it is necessary to monitor this?? Forget it. I...

Today, we're announcing a closer and much deeper relationship with ESRI by integrating Virtual Earth into their ArcGIS Desktop product. As a part of the version 9.3 release, Virtual Earth will natively be a premium content layer so you can simply select...

For as long as I've worked at Microsoft I've seen this issue with a 10,000 pushpin limit in MapPoint 2002, 2004, 2006 and, yes, it still exists in 2009 . The issue is this: if you try to import more than 10,000 addresses into MapPoint you'll get the error...

Don't like JavaScript? You want your managed code with the new wave of AJAX maps? Well, the long awaited Virtual Earth ASP .Net Server Control is now available for download as a part of the Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio . Here are some...

The mysterious Virtual Earth ERO (aka enhanced roll overs). Coded with just a little JavaScript and a lot of Cascading Style Sheets, there is so much to learn and understand about those little buggers and not much of it is documented. Well, Geoff Innis...

Awwwwe yeah, I'm coming home San Diego! I love a free trip home. Microsoft Virtual Earth will have a significant presence at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego August 4 - 8, 2008. We've had some strategic announcements with ESRI this...

It's been a day since I announced trueSpace for Virtual Earth Development and I figured I'd post a few hiccups I had to overcome while developing my ever-so-cool Random Cubes . This won't be the end all support FAQs with trueSpace (you should go to their...

Today is a big day. BIG DAY. As you'll recall, several months ago we acquired Caligari because of their advanced 3D toolset - trueSpace (among other assets). I've always felt sketchy about other 3D freeware, so starting today trueSpace 7.6 is now available...

14.3 TB of new imagery for Microsoft Virtual Earth. Save money on gas....use Live Search Maps powered by Virtual Earth . Ortho United States (UltraCam, Microsoft Proprietary) Elizabeth, NJ West Allis, WI    Paterson, NJ Pasadena, TX Austria...

Marc Schweigert is trying to replace me as the Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist. I kid, I kid! He has bigger fish to fry, but his passion for geospatial solutions is impressive to say the least. He's just put out ANOTHER TWO how-to videos about Microsoft...

Isaac Kunen from the SQL Server team published an outstanding MSDN article entitled, " Introduction to Spatial Coordinate Systems: Flat Maps for a Round Planet ." This is a great article for those of you who are just getting started in GIS,...

Perhaps you've noticed that I've added a little (non-Virtual Earth) map to my blog. Well, as the story goes...I'm always crawling the web for maps. Obviously, I have some kind of passion (read as obsession) with online mapping. So, I come across this...

There are a couple ways to improve performance in when using Microsoft Virtual Earth. One is to limit the number of tiles requested to the client from the control, but when do you want to do this? If you're considering limiting the number of tiles downloaded...

The World Olympics kick off August 6 in Beijing, China with a football match. Inline with CCTV's interactive Microsoft Virtual Earth map-based application for Euro 2008 , today, The BBC News has published their BBC Sport's Olympic Map which uses Microsoft...

Marc Schweigert , is at it again. Check out his 2 latest videos showing you how to add Virtual Earth to your ASP .Net JAX applications . The video is a code walkthrough showing first, an overview of Microsoft Virtual Earth's JavaScript model, next integration...

Inertia is that cool spinning of the globe effect in Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D. Well, it's actually turned OFF by default so you wouldn't necessarily know that inertia is available in Virtual Earth but it is. Go figure. Here's how to enable it: Ensure...

Virtual Earth will be making a cameo at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco next week. We'll have a booth so feel free to stop by to talk shop with any of the Virtual Earth specialists. Also, we have 3 sessions for you to stop by...

It's official! We're releasing an update to the desktop products MapPoint 2009 (Desktop Business Intelligence Mapping and Analysis Tool) and Streets & Trips 2009 (Desktop Consumer Trip Planning). Contrary to the release of MapPoint 2006, there are...

Tomorrow, Weather Central is launching their new MyWeather application for the iPhone and it is pretty darn slick. Okay, sick! The application will provide you with weather updates in tabular format ( iPhone tabular format is like candy), but more importantly...

The Prime Card Map mashup has been around a while, but it needs some love because if you have a Prime Card and have searched with their site....well, you get my drift. I thought it was just for Microsoft employees and families and people who know Microsoft...

ESRI just publicly released their a new version of their ArcGIS JavaScript Extension...using Virtual Earth . Now, you can leverage the powerful analytics and computational GIS models in ESRI ArcGIS Server and visualize this information on Microsoft Virtual...

I recently got pinged about how to change the background color of the DIV element for a Virtual Earth map. Virtual Earth's CSS elements aren't documented (at least not officially), so perhaps this helps those who need/want this changed. So, the typical...

With the imminent deprecation of Virtual Earth Versions 3, 4 and 5 (August 31, 2008) I thought it timely to point out Fiddler's useful capability for testing your applications' upgrade path to Version 6.1 (the current version). Oh, and, what a great way...