I recently was graced with the opportunity to sit in with Robert Hess the host of the Channel 9 online show, The Knowledge Chamber for an episode focused exclusively on Virtual Earth. During the Virtual Earth episode, I focus on the Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control which is currently in community technology preview (CTP) form and available for download from Microsoft Connect. This episode is a result of my MIX Session earlier this year and covers the control at a high level, given we only had about 15 minutes! So, if you missed my MIX session, it’s worth a look-see to get the VESL 101 version of my presentation from Vegas.
From The Knowledge Chamber site…Virtual Earth continues to evolve and support a very robust programming model which allows developers to create unique and interesting mapping applications. One of the most recent developments is that there is a brand new Virtual Earth Mapping control which uses Silverlight for rendering. This provides for a far richer control which gives the developer almost unlimited potential in what they can do. In this episode I've got Chris Pendleton on hand to help us understand some of the benefits of this new control and show us some of its capabilities. Click to watch this episode.
CP
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.
Be sure to visit the main Bing blog for more information.
In the coming weeks you’ll learn more about how we designed Bing to cut through internet clutter and deliver more relevant results to help people make better choices. In the meantime, visit http://www.decisionengine.com and follow Bing on Twitter (@Bing) for all the latest news.
My Twitter remains the same - @chrispendleton. I also set up a Facebook page for all you Bing Maps fans out there. My blog will also be moving soon and will be focusing on both Bing Maps and Bing Maps for Enterprise, so stay tuned for more information on that.
CP – Bing Maps Technical Evangelist….I need new business cards.
I recently posted a little teaser entry about Virtual Earth and Windows 7 - Windows 7 Release Candidate Available…Where’s Virtual Earth? Well, now today there’s more to talk about (and you can expect news to continue to roll out as time goes on). Today, the Windows Team announced the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7. Why should my fellow Virtual Earthlings care? Because there’s a Virtual Earth application included with the Touch Pack called Microsoft Surface Globe…
Microsoft Surface Globe pretty much puts the whole world in your hands (well, kind of!). It uses the Virtual Earth 3D engine to display a 3D version of the world. Using multi-touch, you can navigate to different regions, get local information, and “pin” your favorite locations. You can even “fly” around 3D models of buildings in some cities. The Microsoft Surface Globe was one of the apps Julie Larson-Green demoed at last year’s D: All Things Digital conference. To see the Microsoft Surface Globe app in action – take a look at this video.
Okay, so what does the Microsoft Surface Globe application do? It’s a WPF application that integrates the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D map control with the Surface multi-touch APIs. It also goes full screen exclusive for a true gaming affect. You can annotate the map with your own information and use several different 3D pushpin icons available with the application. The navigation bar allows you to view the Earth orthographically or tilt it for a more oblique view. Also, built into the application is the ability to not only add your own pins, but export them (to a spreadsheet for example) so they can then be uploaded into Live Maps via the Collections Editor. To add a pushpin in Microsoft Surface Globe, simply click the giant pushpin icon in the navigation bar, select the icon you want, then place the pin and add optional text information to it. You can also disable the pins all at once if you want a more clear view of the map experience. The Road map style is also included, so you can see the vector roads as well, although Aerial is the default. The other built-in feature is the ability to search through Collections stored in Live Maps. Click the Collections link on the flip side of the Surface Globe navigation (there’s a small arrow to flip the menu to more options) and you’ll see a card come up in which you can enter things such as “Bars in San Diego, CA.” Doing so will access the Virtual Earth API to search through relevant, location-based Collection items that users from around the world have uploaded into Live Maps.
Now, this being a “touch pack” you should expect to be able to do all of this with a touch screen PC running Windows 7. Now, that being said the application will run with just a mouse and I even plugged in my X-Box controller and that worked the same as it does today, but for those of you who are lucky enough to get a touch screen PC, you can use the following “tip card” that comes with the application to navigate the map. Basically, the Surface team wrapped their gestures APIs to reflect panning, zooming, rotating and tilting the Virtual Earth 3D control.
Greatness. You can read more about the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 on the Windows Team Blog.
Another month of web casts done. This month we focused on business intelligence applications using Microsoft Virtual Earth across the enterprise. The first web cast had tons of information thrown at you about the different scenarios for which you would need different BI applications across different verticals within the enterprise. In the second web cast, we focused on more architecture and the actual technologies behind bringing the applications to life. If you missed either of the web casts for May, you can watch them on demand via the Momentum web site.
There’s a web cast on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 @ 11:30 AM PDT hosted by IS Consulting (creators of Map Dot Net) titled, “Virtual Earth for Economic Development in Government.” Here’s the brief, Join the Virtual Earth team, ISC, and the Economic Development Council of Tallahassee/Leon County to learn how geospatial visualization and analysis can support economic development. This webcast will introduce the technologies behind a new, user-friendly Web site that is helping Tallahassee and surrounding areas drive interest in the region and promote commercial growth. For more information, check out the Virtual Earth for Government blog.
For updates on future web casts or to watch any of the previously recorded web cast, visit our events page on the Virtual Earth Marketing site.
Remember a few weeks ago, when Air Force one flew over downtown Manhattan escorted by a F-16 and scared the bejesus out of every New Yorker lighting nostalgic sparks of 9/11? Well, our partners at 3DVia decided to recreate the scene using Virtual Earth 3D – much less intimidating and considering they didn’t actually get the pictures they wanted, the same end result. Although, they could’ve used our photogrammetrics to superimpose a scene; but, I suppose that would’ve been too cost effective.
Just a little something fun for your hump day.
Today we’re announcing the rollout of Virtual Earth to the Content Delivery Network (a part of Microsoft's Edge Computing Network). What does this mean? Well, Virtual Earth has historically been in a single data center serving up all these billions of tile images (and the AJAX map control) which service our mapping platforms including the AJAX map control, Silverlight Map Control, Virtual Earth Web Service and 3D Managed Control. Now, we’ve deployed the Virtual Earth map tiles and AJAX control to geographically dispersed data centers that provide global load balancing which means you’ll get your Virtual Earth tiles and AJAX control from the data center that is closest to you – no more waiting for tiles to come from Virginia.
Here’s official communication that went to our customers and developers today:
Get Virtual Earth Content Faster through the New Content Delivery Network
Today, Microsoft® is pleased to introduce a new performance improvement for the Virtual Earth platform – the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Microsoft CDN is a key pillar of the Microsoft cloud computing strategy and is one of the primary investments the Virtual Earth team is making to increase overall platform performance.
CDN is composed of multiple geo-distributed data centers (throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia) that allow Virtual Earth to host content closer to customers and end users.
As a result of CDN, delivery speeds of Virtual Earth content have been improved up to 82 percent for both the Virtual Earth AJAX Map Control and Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control. This first release is part of an on-going program that will expand the network later this year.
To begin utilizing CDN, you will need to make an opt-in, non-breaking change to your AJAX map control code; no action is required for Silverlight Map Control users, as CDN logic is already built-in. Given the significant performance benefits of CDN, it will be the preferred method of accessing Virtual Earth content.
For details on implementing CDN for the Virtual Earth AJAX Map Control, please visit the associated documentation on MSDN.
A simple changing of the Virtual Earth .ashx pointer and you’re on your way. The CDN will continue to grow over time - we have some big plans rolling out over the next year. So, with the last release of the AJAX control and the 3D control, plus the roll out of the Silverlight Map Control and now we’re coming online with ECN/CDN I’m guessing whatever performance issues certain people have complained about in the past and decided to invest elsewhere have all but gone away. We welcome you back when you’re ready.
As a follow up to my presentation at MIX this year, I’ll be flying down under to attend REMIX – a sort of worldwide syndication of MIX. REMIX Australia will be held on Thursday, June 11 at the Star City Hotel in the Grand Harbour Ballroom at 80 Pyrmont Street, Pyrmont NSW. My session, currently titled, “Introducing the Microsoft Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control CTP” will cover the basics constructs of the Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control, how to integrate it into your applications and I’ll provide some demonstrations of applications that have been built using the control since the launch in March at MIX in Las Vegas. Of course, I have some tricks up my sleeve to make it worth your time, so make it if you can.
Today’s to do list (for you):
OnStar (a part of General Motors) today announced their new application to integrate Microsoft Virtual Earth into their emergency response system as a data visualization function to better serve their customers. And, do you blame them? What a huge value add this will be for helping them sell their service! With our super, high resolution photography and high fidelity road network information, wouldn’t you feel better knowing that in the case of an emergency the customer service representative can actually see a high resolution photo of where you, that’s relatively recently taken with up to date road data to help you get on your way? And, OnStar could tie into our local search listings to find the nearest (or preferred) tow trucks, auto mechanics or even hotels. Maybe you want a little Starbucks to ease the pain – that’s in their too! Okay, that would be just me. They could also provide directions using our routing algorithms to provide users with directions based on slowest, fastest, multi-point, traffic-based and in some cases – walking. Let’s hope not in this situation! What’s even better is OnStar is using Virtual Earth 3D to give them a truly immersive view of where users are and the area surrounding them. The solution is an excellent example of how Virtual Earth’s entire platform - high resolution photos, expansive data sets, up to date road maps, 3D experience and routing algorithms can help in an emergency situation such as those that OnStar provides assistance for.
For those of you who want it, here’s the full press release.
Okay, it’s been a long day, so let’s find today’s time waster to blow off some steam…ah, UMapper has a new Flash-based, Microsoft Virtual Earth game called “GeoDart.” The object? Click the aerial photo closest to location specified to identify where it is. The closer you are and the faster you respond, the more points you accumulate. Get a high score and you get bragging rights for the rest of the week. Enjoy, and apologize to your managers for me as productivity is about to go through the floor.
There are currently two versions of the game UMapper game:
However, if you don’t like the current versions of the games, well, make your own! UMapper is providing the ability to make your own version of the game. Also, you can see what games other people have made as a part of the community. I like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, because, well, there are only 7. I even made my own little game so you can see what conferences I’ll be at and when…aptly named, Where is CP, When? Play my game, then go make your own.
I just want to give IDV Solutions a huge shout out today. I dragged myself in to work after waking to another dreary Seattle morning. Hoping the coffee would perk me up…bring out the fail whale. However, this morning I finally got some time to investigate the latest version of IDV’s Visual Fusion (4.0). After just a few clicks, I am re-inspired to take on the mapping world – which is good because I have a web cast here in 30 minutes!
Visual Fusion is an enterprise mashup platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of SharePoint. Integrate enterprise information, Web services, and unstructured workgroup files into a single interactive picture, and present them in the context of location, time, or other visualization. Communicate the big picture immediately, and allow users to discover, contribute, collaborate, and act. Test drive Visual Fusion 4.0 as seen above.
Now, what you see above is a fairly robust demonstration of the visualization capabilities provided by Visual Fusion 4.0. The demonstration integrates all kinds of great data such as US County Demographics, US Market Population (Bars and Radius), Population by County, and Public RSS feeds such as Swine Flu cases and National Parks. You can also search Wikipedia and map out information from there. They’ve even integrated some Web Mapping Services (WMS) such as US Weather Radar and NASA Elevation Models.
What else? Geocoding. Weather overlays. Silverlight UX. Road, Aerial, Hybrid map styles. New, proprietary map styles – Low Light and Blue Print. Bathymetry. Simple SharePoint dashboard interface. Now, this is jam-packed with data – a shorter list is what they don’t have; but, where Visual Fusion is most powerful is visualizing YOUR data. This experience will change your perspective on how critical maps have become to visualizing your asset, financial, emergency, etc. etc. information.
I’ll be talking about this in detail during my “Visualizing Data Across the Enterprise with Virtual Earth” web cast which starts here shortly (if you missed it a recording will be made available online later this week). Next week, well do the technical deep dive in “Developers Can Boost Business Across the Enterprise”
Nicely done, IDV Solutions. You’ve made my day.
MSN just launched a new version of their local offering dubbed, MSN City Guides (read the press release). Okay, just another local listing site with maps, right? Oh, no…this one is the beginning of something pretty great and very community driven and it has Microsoft Virtual Earth. Fine, I’m skewed, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a shiny new toy. I set my location to Louisville, KY – I’m heading out there this week for the Pendleton Golf Invitational – a little view into my world for you. Anyway, by default, Louisville, KY is now my home location so when I return to City Guides it automagically suggests results related to Louisville. Now, let’s explore the feature set….
I did a search for “Covered Bridge” near Louisville, KY. Covered Bridge is Fuzzy Zoeller’s course and it’s actually in Indiana. Anyway, my search produced a few results one of which was “Covered Bridge Golf Course.” Nice. I click it and get a results page with a Virtual Earth map and a pin that contains additional information in the roll over. But you know, that’s pretty basic stuff.
Now, you should know that whenever I go back to Louisville (yes, I frequent it) I hit White Castle, so let’s do that. I’m going to get a plethora of White Castle listings, so more importantly I want to see where they are in respect to where I’m staying…no, I won’t let you that far into my life! By default a list view is provided to show all the listings around the specific area; however, there’s also a “Map View” button you can click and throw all of the listings onto a Virtual Earth map. Wohoo!. As you hover over each location, you can see additional information about that location such as the contact information and pictures of the location; but, even better you can add it to your travel diary (of sorts). You can “Plan To Go” there which will add it to your collection of places you want to go; or, you can say you’ve already “Been There” which adds it to a collection of places you’ve already been. Also, if you have been there, you can “Review It” and provide information about your experience; or, you can “Upload a Photo” which is funny because when I first started traveling I would always take a picture of where I ate. I should dig those up. You can also “Invite a Friend” to join you at the respective location in the case that they also want a 6 pack of White Castle Burgers and a Big Red. Mmmm. One nice touch of the site was as you hover over the listings on the left, it will re-center the map for you. Of course, Aerial and Road map styles are available, as well as 3D.
So, go explore, try it out, write some reviews and eat White Castle.
The Knowledge of Real Estate – REonomy – launched May 1 leveraging Microsoft Virtual Earth as the first online information provider to integrated parcel data and comprehensive property research tools with a MLS and advanced marketing tools in one location (press release). REonomy.com serves the needs of real estate professionals industry-wide, including brokers, agents, development/management companies, lenders, third-party analysts, and private equity firms, among others.
The REonomy site is locked down for registered users, but they gave me special access and permission to share what’s on the inside with you. I’ll focus on the mapping components, since that’s what I care about, but it should be known that this site is jam-packed full of features for agents, brokers and the like so it should be interesting for those of us not in real estate to get a look on the other side of the proverbial fence.
Once you get to the map-based listings page you get a plethora of information about properties (specific to New York and New Jersey). First, they’ve implemented their own custom navigation bar and moved it to the upper right. It includes links for all map styles and the 3D map mode, plus navigation features for rotation, panning and zooming. Now, zoom in and you’ll see the parcel layers load as a raster overlay. This is where the brilliance begins, so I’ll explain how this works in a minute. If you click on any parcel REonomy looks up the parcel in question, highlights it, provides the address and property information, drops a pin at the center of the property and creates an enhanced roll over (ERO) with additional information and a link to view the property. How’s that for a robust, exploratory user experience?
So, how is this done….well, here’s what they could be doing…first, they generate a tile layer based on parcel data that aligns with the Virtual Earth tile pyramid (which, by the way, the MSDN technical article was recently updated to include pixel to lat/lon conversion sample code). They overlay this using map.AddTileLayer(). Next, when you click on the parcel, you’re actually clicking a pixel on the screen. Catching the right mouse click event, they’re firing off a method to reverse the pixel to a lat/lon (map.PixelToLatLong()) which gives them a coordinate that they can send to their spatial database. They look up which polygon the point resides in (in this example the polygon is a parcel), grab the vertices of the polygon and renders the polygon and a pushpin on the map using map.AddShape(). Also, with the spatial query, they identify the polygon in which the point resides and pull all the respective information out of the database about that parcel and push it into the DIV (hovering over the map) and ERO. Awesome and very intuitive!
Next, I tried the “Advanced Search” which allows you to select the Property Type – Residential or Commercial; Availability Type – Sale or Lease; Area Range applies to – Property or Listing; square footage and a boatload of amenities (including Door Man! I <3 NY). When I searched, the results produced a number of results pinned to the map, the parcel overlays, the properties that were returned had their parcels highlighted on the map and the enhanced rollovers were populated with property information and linked off to view the property. This alone was fantastic, but when I switched to 3D and loaded the high resolution, scaled, textured models included with Virtual Earth’s platform well, the result was stunning. You’ll notice the parcels are still highlighted under the buildings and the pins remain intact and tied to the top of the respective properties. What’s great about all of this is that they didn’t really have to do any extra work – as you develop in 2D, viewing your data in 3D is flipping one bit native to the AJAX control!
All in all a fantastic set of functionality and a new showcase for my on stage demos. I guess my only feature request would be to not use our ugly red pins. The site is marvelous and our red pins really do it an injustice. Also, how cool would Photosynth look on this site? Am I greedy? Gordon Gecko says greed is good and it works, so I’m going with that.
A few months ago, Photosynth became a part of the Microsoft Virtual Earth team and shortly thereafter launched the availability for all users to create and upload Synths into our cloud storage. Of course, I had to take it a step further and integrate it with Virtual Earth - Photosynth Released - Now, Let's Mash it with Virtual Earth. Well, we’ve just announced some new capabilities and support for our commercial customers which make Photosynth enterprise ready and scaled out for the world to start taking advantage of.
So, in true CP style, let me break this down for you (the full press release is below), but simply put here’s what you get with the updated, commercially viable version of Photosynth:
If you want to see Photosynth in action within a commercial application, I found a couple web sites that may spark some ideas on how you can integrate it with yours:
And just for fun, here are some educational videos to help you learn more about Photosynth:
For full details about today’s announcement, read the “Microsoft Photosynth Integrates into Virtual Earth, Marking Commercial Availability of the 3D Photo Technology” press release.
Don’t forget I synthed myself way back when so anything is possible to reach some level of synthyness. Get started on your own synths.
With the release of Windows 7 RC to the world which you can now freely download from the Microsoft Windows web site, I figured I would at least let you know where Microsoft Virtual Earth fits into the equation. First off, there’s a location API built into the operating system. This means that from within Windows your applications can access a single API that will tell you where the user is. Well, any time you have location information it’s pretty much a given that you’ll want to see it on a map. So, as you start diving into the Windows 7 API I’m going to expect some killer Virtual Earth apps, so send them my way.
In the meantime, I thought I’d point out at least one Virtual Earth application that you can expect to have some fun with. Actually, it’s a gadget for reading GeoRSS feeds from your desktop. The folks at The Carbon Project have released a gadget on behalf of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) as an open source desktop dashboard for Geodata.gov, the federal government service for maps and data providing an “at-a-glance” visualization of geospatial assets and monitoring of Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) Portal search functions. The Dashboard is based on Microsoft Gadgets and enhances common RSS functions with the ability to configure searches, view geodata footprints on a mini-map, and access desktop GIS applications from ESRI and other vendors directly with the data people find.
For more information about the project, check out the Carbon Cloud blog. Go download Windows 7…you seriously won’t regret it.
Keith Kinnan will be on site presenting at Tech Ed this year in Los Angeles, Wednesday, May 13 in a session titled “Deep Dive on Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control (session ID: WUX402).” Ok, so I did a deep dive talk at MIX which you can watch online, BTW. “Well, Chris,” you may ask, “why would I want to go see Keith’s presentation if I already saw yours?” Um, because Keith is the lead developer of the Silverlight Map Control (and the AJAX Map Control). So, he’s kind of important and knows everything there is to know about both controls. Yeaaaah, you might want to talk with him if you’re at Tech Ed and care about online mapping technologies; but at the very least you should attend his presentation.
Here’s the description of Keith’s presentation: The Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform has grown immensely over the past year from our Virtual Earth AJAX Map Control to our new Virtual Earth Web Services and now our Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control which is now available as a public beta to developers. Come and join us as we take you on a tour of all the features and dig deep into the code to show you how to build your own Virtual Earth applications in Silverlight.
So, your to do items for today: