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ViaWindowsLive on Via Virtual Earth Blog
The new ViaWindowsLive community site has launched and features not only a definitive set of resources on all Live Services from Microsoft but also a special section on Virtual Earth including a new site gallery for you to upload your sites, new articles on Version 6, including getting started guide, an interactive quick guide, location finder and more. Subscribe to the VWL aggregated blog to stay in touch with everything Live Services related. Find all the great content from this site and much, much more. Explore how other Live Services can compliment Virtual Earth and your applications.
Version 5 URL changed - Error: 'VEMap' is undefined on Via Virtual Earth Blog
It has been reported that the old url to access the Version5 javascript for Virtual Earth no longer works. This is effecting sites worldwide.
The correct way to reference the Version 5 javascript is:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=5"></script>
If you have been effected a forum thread has been started here
Silverlight Virtual Earth viewer on Via Virtual Earth Blog
With the launch of silverlight yesterday I was digging around and found this viewer for Virtual Earth by Greg Schechter. It does use the 1.1 alpha of silverlight. It gives some interesting ideas for where Virtual Earth could be headed. Certainly the demo of the performance of silverlight compared to javascript for processing showed a significant increase. This could be very useful.
And of course on the gamer front check this out by Andy Beaulieu and shoot down some UFO's over Birdseye images.
John.
So much new Virtual Earth Imagery Worldwide. on Via Virtual Earth Blog
I subscribe to all the VE blogs and recently the posts about updated imagery has been more and more frequent.
The latest is here and for myself downunder we saw three updates, Canberra, Newcastle and Uluru:
Derek Chan posts 3 Articles in a month! on Via Virtual Earth Blog
A big thank you to the efforts of Derek Chan who posted his third VE article today (he actually had it ready weeks ago but had to wait for Mr Bottleneck here at VVE ;) )
The 3 articles are all relivant to Version 5 of Virtual Earth and deal with the Mini Map, debugging javascript and now custom pins in routes.
All these can now be found in our articles section.
If you have something to contribute send us an email.
John (The bottleneck)
Implementation - Overlapping Pushpins
1 - 8 of 8
Overlapping Pushpins by Dr. Neil on 7 Jul 06 @ 07:30:00 UTC
Detecting if pushpins overlap can be solved in a simplistic way by checking if the bounding boxes of the pin elements overlap.
I have provided an example here:
http://www.viavirtualearth.com/MyVirtualEarth/v3/pushpincollision.htm
Remember that the overlap will depend on the zoom level of the map. To see a collision zoom out in the example map.
RE: Overlapping Pushpins by GlennM on 10 Jul 06 @ 04:40:00 UTC
I'm not sure what the point is of doing this.
What is really needed is the ability to have pins _positioned_ so that they avoid collisions. Eg, like the AvoidCollisions option in MapPoint Web Service. The detection of collisions you demonstrate might be the beginnings of this.
Without that we cannot use Virtual Earth for what we want. We have many jobs performed at the exact same address, therefore the exact same geolocations. In Virtual Earth the pins are rendered on top of each other. Regardless of zoom level we never see and cannot interact with both of them.
RE: Overlapping Pushpins by Dr. Neil on 10 Jul 06 @ 07:47:00 UTC
I did it because it was something that was requested.
Now you know when pins overlap you can do something with that information.
You could build a mega-cluster(yes I made the term up) pin that represents more than one pin, you could move the pins so they don't overlap, or you might decide to hide some pins.
It would be great to see some posts here showing what you decide to do and how to do it.
RE: Overlapping Pushpins by GlennM on 11 Jul 06 @ 04:36:00 UTC
Unfortunately we have decided not to use Virtual Earth until this feature is part of the library proper. As Microsoft is recommending a move from MapPoint to VE (at least for us) we need the same feature set.
And collision avoidance is a difficult problem to solve which Microsoft has done once in MapPoint. I assume they could port the algorithm to VE. Pins with tails might be hard though!
RE: Overlapping Pushpins by SoulSolutions on 11 Jul 06 @ 07:23:00 UTC
A mega cluster - nice
Yes we plan to use this on our current project, just need to play with what we show on the mega cluster pin so it gives meaning and doesn't become a mega ballon.
I think we need to make an effort to build this out of what we have before MS is going to just make it for us.
The concept we are looking at is having .net produce the GeoRSS feed and limit the pins and group based on zoom and proximity. Basically a solution for putting thousands of pins on a map. As you zoom in the layer refreshes to seperate clusters into smaller clusters and eventually single pins.
Anyway now I'm going to have to think of other cool names....
John.
RE: Overlapping Pushpins by SoulSolutions on 20 Jul 06 @ 07:39:00 UTC
Hey if your interested I just posted my thoughts and logic around Mega clusters over at MSDN forums:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=567362&SiteID=1
Please have a read a leave some useful suggestions.
Thanks
John.
RE: Overlapping Pushpins by SoulSolutions on 23 Jul 06 @ 07:24:00 UTC
The key difference with what I'm looking at over the Example from Dr Neil is the above example detects collisions using javascript while I'm refreshing the data on every pan, zoom etc and processing the collisions / forming mega clusters server side.
John.