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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)
Fun with IE Image Filters and Virtual Earth RSS
I was playing today with some logos in Photoshop and noticed our graphic design team had inverted our gold logo on a black background to be a nice blue logo on a white background. For fun, I happened to have a Virtual Earth project open at the time and I inverted the default road map in Photoshop.
Wow now thats actually pretty cool, not sure what the usages would be but I wonder how to do this on the VE control?
I know that IE provides filters that can be applied in CSS and this got me thinking about what effects could be acheived.
The syntax I used was to apply the filter to all <img> objects within the Map div. This should eliminate all the other parts of your interface changing but since there is no class set on the tiles themselves this is the best solution I could find.
<style type="text/css">
.MSVE_Map img {filter:Invert;}
</style>
Xray
Engrave
And just to freak someone out how about a bit of a flip per tile?
I'm not sure of the practical applications for this but I actually think the inverted map is easier to read at nighttime.
Click on each image to see it live on the Virtual Earth map.
Article contributed by John O'Brien (www.soulsolutions.com.au). Have you got something to contribute?