Darryl Burling @ Work : live

Host your email using Live Mail and Live Domains

dburling — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:06:34 GMT

Mauricio set up geekzonemail.com last week. In two days he signed up 50 new email accounts - pretty impressive. He's also posted a FAQ about how he did it.

I was talking with him about it last week and he pointed out just how easy it is to set up your own domain name to point to Windows Live Hotmail. So I went and did it with my own domain (actually two of them) and thought I might share the methodology here given it was so easy.

Firstly you'll need to own a domain name. I use Discount Domains, for NZ domains - NZ domains cost NZ$33 per year. If you want a .com, you might want to try GoDaddy as their prices are quite reasonable (at US$8.99).

Once you have your domain, head to http://domains.live.com and sign in using a Live ID. Once you are signed in click the Add domain button. Enter the domain name and click Continue (by default the "Set up Windows Live Hotmail for my domain" radio box should be selected). Click the I Accept button to accept the license agreement (of course you should always read this first).

Now head over to your DNS provider and change the MX record to match the settings given to you by Live Domains. You may also want to add the TXT record. Once you've done the MX record flick back to domains.live.com and change the MX record. In my experience the Live Domains should pick up the change immediately. Once done, you can add accounts to the domain.

If the account already exists (i.e. you've used it for a LiveID without mail in the past) you'll get the option to import it. This seems to convert the account without actually bringing any settings over with it, so if you used the account with Live Messenger, your buddy list will be no more (not necessarily a good thing). The association with other Live accounts (such as Live Spaces) will be retained.

Once you add the account, you can go to http://mail.live.com and login with the account details. If you imported the account you'll need to use the password that was originally assigned to the account.

Other nice to have features include the ability to have mail.yourdomain.com point to mail.live.com. You can also have maps.yourdomain.com (using Live Maps), blog.yourdomain.com (using Live Spaces), etc.

If you want to, you can also open up the mail as Mauricio has done to allow anyone to have an email address at your domain.

You are also not restricted to using web mail. Live mail supports the Outlook Connector for Live mail (recently updated), the Live Mail Beta (if you can get it - which you can't in NZ) or Windows Mobile (including push mail in Windows Mobile 6).

With messenger integration you'll also get a pop up (configurable naturally) that tells you when you get new mail.

What's not to like? - Did I mention each user still gets 2Gb of storage? Old news, but some people don't know it...

Things I love about the new Live Writer

dburling — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:43:00 GMT

I really like live writer. I love online/offline applications that have both a software and an online component - I get the best of the experience with the best of the reach. Anyway, I've already talked about that and that's not what this post is about.

I really like some of the new features of Live Writer.

My favorites are spell checking (which was notably missing in the previous version), the new category picker (why can't I create a category though?), the icon next to the weblog (its the little things too) and my personal fav is the "Set publish date" feature.

I tend to post in spurts and its always bothered me that they turn up in a cluster and then I appear to take a holiday from blogging for a week. Now I can "manage" that better :-)

The only problem is that with a blogging engine based somewhere in the US and me based here in NZ time zone, there is a bit of guessing as to when the post needs to be set to appear...

Getting the new Live betas in New Zealand

dburling — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:42:46 GMT

If you are a fan of Live Mail Desktop Beta (now Live Mail Beta) or Live Writer and have noticed that they've been released but are not available in New Zealand, there is a pretty simple way to get these betas (and they are pretty cool - if its just for spell checking in live writer - so its worth the tiny extra effort to get them).

The page you want it http://get.live.com, however you'll get a placeholder page if you visit the site using the EN-NZ language settings. To work around this (in IE7 anyway) click the tools drop town button on the top right side of the window and select Internet Options then click the languages button at the bottom of the dialog. Click Add and find the language entry that reads "English (United States) [en-us]" and add it. Change the priority so that US English is on top of NZ English as shown in the image to the right and then click the OK buttons to close the dialogs.

Now if you open another instance of Internet explorer (or close the one you are using and open a new one - a forced refresh should also work...) you'll be able to browse the URL above. To quickly get the downloads try this link for Live Mail and this link for Live Writer.

Don?t forget to change the language order back when you have finished. That way you get NZ customized content on http://msdn.microsoft.com :-)

Mix, Silverlight and the DLR

dburling — Thu, 03 May 2007 05:41:00 GMT

I’m sure you’ve heard the headline items from Mix.

I thought I’d put up a couple of links for the things that I found interesting.

If you’ve got the time, I’d recommend watching the Mix keynote video (warning it’s 2.5 hours). In this you’ll get an overview of Silverlight, the cross platform CLR, ruby in the browser, and some very, very cool demos (favs include debugging a silverlight app running on a browser from a windows box, installing Silverlight, and that 20 second chess match!)

I’d also check out

Robert Scobles interview with Scott Guthrie,
Steve Gilmours take (who isn't a MS fan at all)
John Lam - one of the guys responsible for the dynamic language runtime (John did the orginal port of Ruby.Net) on what the DLR is and why it was made
Scott Guthrie on silverlight and the cross platform CLR
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch on why silverlight is important.
Scott Hanselmans "putting it all in context" post is worth a read too.
For local context JB and Alex have got some good coverage.

Personally, I'm looking forward to delving into Silverlight and silverlight streaming (4Gb for free!) in the near future, but I'm also liking in the new Live API's.

Surveying in Virtual Earth

dburling — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 04:23:30 GMT

Many organizations now use polls and surveys to get information about their end users and evaluate how they are perceived in the market. Another common thing that surveys are used for is to gather demographic information.

In Auckland there is some talk about a second .Net User Group. So to help get an idea of where people are going from, coming too and what sort of location would be good for a .Net User group I wrote a simple survey tool in Virtual Earth to figure out where people live and where they work.

This solution is currently not in use in the wild, however, I thought I'd put the code up here as it is quite a cool way of getting information from users and adding it to a database.

Firstly I've constructed this as a HTML page, but you could modify it to work in an ASP.Net page pretty easily. I've also set the form to post to another page rather than handle that in the same page -but again, you could modify the behavior of this to suit.

So - to get started have a look at the SDK at http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk - its interactive - tell it what you want and it spits out the code. The following is really just a hashing together of the elements that are needed.

The concept of this solution is that the user can right click on the map to place a push pin - when they do this they get the option to specify whether the push pin indicates where they work or live. They select one which makes a permanent push pin appropriately labeled in the specified location. In addition the Lat/Long coordinates of the location is logged to the text boxes at the bottom of the form. In the real world, you'd probably want to hide these, but they are shown here for demo purposes.

Firstly, you'll want to put together the basics of the page. The base page is pretty simple and looks like this:

The first thing to add is the line for the Virtual Earth map script, some textboxes for the coordinates and the form to do the submit. After this it looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
  <title>Virtual Earth Survey</title>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v4/mapcontrol.js"></script>      
 </head>

   <body>
   <h3>Darryl's quick survey tool.</h3>
   <p>Zoom in to where you work and live, then right click to place a push pin and set the location.</p>
   <form id='whereamiform' action='somepage.html' onsubmit='return dosubmit()'>
   <div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:400px; height:400px;"></div>   
   Home Latitude: <input type="text" id="lat1" name="lat1" /><br />
   Home Longitude: <input type="text" id="long1" name="long1" /><br />
   Work Latitude: <input type="text" id="lat2" name="lat2" /><br />
   Work Longitude: <input type="text" id="long2" name="long2" /><br />
   <input type='submit' value='Save' style='display:none' id='cmdSave' name='cmdSave' />
   </form>
   </body>
</html>

The script line is the map controls used by Virtual Earth. All the mapping commands you'll use are in here - its essentially the API. Next you'll also notice I've put in the boxes for the Latitude and Longitude and a form with a save button to send the data to the "somepage.html" page that will handle the postback - although you'll notice that the button is hidden by style.

Lets add some code. Firstly we need to modify the body tag to read: <body onload="GetMap();">

We also need to add the GetMap function to the head of the document. This is a simple piece of javascript that looks like this:

    function GetMap()
    {
        map    = new VEMap('myMap');
        map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(-41.28259567324982, 174.77662324905393), 12 ,'r' ,false);
    }

The LoadMap function takes a Latitude/Longitude argument, a zoom (from 1-16), the type of map ('r' = road, 'h'=hybrid, etc) and the last one is to show whether the map is fixed so the user cannot change it. More details and options on the LoadMap call are here. You should now be able to load the page and you should have a map appear on the page.

To make the context menu appear we need to Attach an event to the map. The Virtual Earth API allows you to add your own events pretty easily. The following line at the end of the GetMap() function will do this for us:

        map.AttachEvent("oncontextmenu", AddMyPin);

This will cause the AddMyPin() function to be called whenever the context menu is called - that is when the right mouse button is clicked. Next I'm going to add some variables which we'll use later on - these go before the GetMap() function:

    var map = null;
    var pinID = 1;
    var workPin;
    var homePin;

Next we need to make AddMyPin() do something useful. My AddMyPin() function looks like this:

    function AddMyPin(e)
    {
        var pin = new VEPushpin(
            pinID,
            new VELatLong(e.view.LatLong.Latitude, e.view.LatLong.Longitude),
            null,
            'Locating me...',
            '<a href="javascript:AddWork('+e.view.LatLong.Latitude+','+e.view.LatLong.Longitude+','+pinID+')">This is where I work</a><br /><a href="javascript:AddHome('+e.view.LatLong.Latitude+','+e.view.LatLong.Longitude+','+pinID+')">This is where I live</a>'
            );
        map.AddPushpin(pin);
        pinID++;
    }

Thats is pretty ugly. What I'm doing here is adding a new pushpin. the Pushpin takes a bunch of arguments - which are in order: the pin number (for easy identification later), the location of the pin (in this case the latitude/longitude that the user clicked - which was sent as part of the event argument "e"), the icon for the pushpin image (null = default), the Title of the call out and the text for the call out. In the Text for the call out, I've put in some pretty ugly javascript. What this gives the user is two hyperlinks to click - each of these hyperlinks calls another function depending on whether they select the "work" hyperlink or the "home" hyperlink. There are other arguments you could add to this - more details here.

Next we need to add the functions that clicking these links will call. There are three functions - one for home, one for work and one which checks whether to display the save button or not. You could probably reduce this to just one function pretty easily by adding some more variables to the function call, but for the sake of simplicity, here are my functions:

    function AddWork(e,f,pinNum)
    {
        try
        {
            map.DeletePushpin(workPin);            
        }
        catch (err)
        {
        }
        map.DeletePushpin(pinNum);
        var pin = new VEPushpin(
            pinID,
            new VELatLong(e,f),
            null,
            "This is where I work"
        );
        map.AddPushpin(pin);
        document.forms[0].lat2.value=e;
        document.forms[0].long2.value=f;
        workPin=pinID;
        pinID++;
        checkSubmit();
    }

    function AddHome(e,f,pinNum)
    {
        try
        {
            map.DeletePushpin(homePin);
        }
        catch (err)
        {
        }
        map.DeletePushpin(pinNum);
        var pin = new VEPushpin(
            pinID,
            new VELatLong(e,f),
            null,
            "This is where I live"
        );
        map.AddPushpin(pin);
        document.forms[0].lat1.value=e;
        document.forms[0].long1.value=f;
        homePin=pinID;
        pinID++;
        checkSubmit();
    }

    function checkSubmit()
    {
        if ((document.forms[0].lat1.value != '') && (document.forms[0].long1.value != '') && (document.forms[0].lat2.value != '') && (document.forms[0].long2.value != ''))
        {
            document.forms[0].cmdSave.style.display='inline';
        }
    }

The work and home functions remove any existing work or home pushpins (after all you can't live in more than one place at a time - or can you?), then they add a new pushpin and save the Pin ID to the appropriate variable, and record the latitude and longitude in the text boxes in the form. The last thing the functions do is check to see if both work and home have been identified and if they have show the save button.

The only other thing that is necessary for this form is to do any processing that might need to be done when the form is submitted. I've just put the following place holder function in to do this for the moment:

    function dosubmit()
    {
        alert("in the real world you'd have just told someone where you live and work");
        return false;
    }

Thats pretty much it. You'll want to make it look pretty and create a page to receive the information and do something with it (like store it) but for all intents and purposes, you've now got yourself a survey tool in Virtual Earth in around 100 lines of html and javascript code.

The best place to figure out the API for all these things IMHO is the Reference SDK (note you'll want to click the tab oddly called "Reference SDK" on this page to find it)

Technorati tags: Virtual Earth, live local, live, Visual Studio, mashup, HTML, JavaScript

Build a simple store locator with Virtual Earth - part 1

dburling — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:17:13 GMT

One of the things I've noticed is that most organizations are providing really basic store/branch/site locators with their websites. For most of these locations it means that

There is no immediate recognition of of the site relative to the end user
Reading and comprehension is harder meaning more effort is required by the user to translate the location, leading to inaccuracies and ultimately reduced customer satisfaction
Often the user wont know the street (particularly in cities) meaning the address is a non starter
Evenif they know the street numbers are hard to figure out - particularly on long streets/roads
Once the user comprehends the location they need to figure out how to get there as quickly as possible.

Having a dynamic map (such as Virtual Earth) can fix these issues in a single, simple solution and for no cost!

The simplest way to create a store locator without making large modifications to the existing site is to create a hyperlink that opens a window with a map inside it.

Take for example the following store location:

Lambton Quay Branch
157 Lambton Quay,
Wellingotn,
New Zealand

In this case you've got the name of the branch and the address right there. If you combine the address into the following hyperlink you get something that virtual earth can understand. Go to www.windowslivelocal.com and in the second box at the top enter the address and hit enter as shown in the picture above

You may want to rename the location (hover over the address and select "Edit" from the flyout menu). Next you'll want to copy the link to the clipboard as shown. This will put a hyperlink into the clipboard. You can test this by pasting it into the address bar of the browser.

Once you've got that link its just a matter of adding a hyper link to the text. The above example would mean the following link:

<a 
href="http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=Point.83kn85zjy5n3_Lambton%20Quay%20Branch___" 
target="_blank">Lambton Quay Branch</a>

Thats it! Now when someone clicks the link they will be directed to Windows Live Local with a push pin showing what it is that you are trying to show them. They can then get driving directions and find their way to your store much more easily.

This is obviously not the perfect scenario, as you are sending customers to a site that is not branded with your brand and that you have no control over, but its an easy to implement sample that gives more detail than no map.

Next I'll show how you can add your branding to the map thats shown.

Technorati tags: VirtualEarth, live.com, virtual earth