|
|
-
Hey everyone. Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. Been a little crazy for me lately getting everything ramped up for our upcoming release of Virtual Earth which is due here very very soon. When we were all at Tech Ed North America in Orlando, FL this past June I sat down with Angus Logan, Dr. Neil and Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks! fame for a little interview. We covered a bunch of stuff including our upcoming Virtual Earth release which will feature v1 of our Virtual Earth Web Services. Our recent CTP release of the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control, our UltraCam, 3D models as well as a bunch of other Windows Live Platform services including Messenger, Silverlight Streaming, etc. We also go into excruciating detail into the definition, exploration and proper usage of the word, “Chuffed”. (Stream High | Stream Low | WMV Lo | WMV Hi | MP4 | MP3) Enjoy !!!
|
-
We’ve recently opened a reseller channel to offer our high-resolution UltraCam imagery for offline applications. Why is VE licensing imagery for offline use? Our hi-resolution UltraCam ortho imagery is prized for GIS, urban planning, engineering and other applications that are often performed in offline desktop environments, yet our existing VE offerings prohibit any offline use of our data. By offering our data in an offline mode, we complement our online VE web service offerings and increase Microsoft and VE brand awareness worldwide. How is this Being Done? Our resellers, MapMart.com and i-cubed LLC will host the data and provide sales, marketing and fulfillment services, and both are just now bringing the VE data portal sites fully online. Both are top-notch companies with proven leadership in the geodata markets, and we’re excited to have them lead our channel sales. What’s Available and Who Needs it? Currently we have over 200 cities of color airborne imagery collected at 6” nominal resolution, averaging less than two years old. The 6” spatial resolution rivals any large-scale commercial source today, and our newest processing techniques produce ortho mosaics with almost no building lean in the image- invaluable for unobstructed views into areas with tall buildings, etc. As Microsoft acquires and processes imagery for more cities around the world, the archive is expected to grow substantially. This imagery is invaluable for urban planners, GIS analysts, and the prosumer geospatial market. We expect municipalities, engineering firms, emergency response agencies, and utilities to be core customers. PS: I checked and we are holding off on onboarding any new resellers for the next 6 months so for all of you who want to be resellers just hang tight.
|
-
Hey everyone. So I’ve published our second episode in our series, Behind the Maps - The Technology of Virtual Earth, on Virtual Earth out on Channel 9. In this episode, Flying the UltraCam we go to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, home of Keystone Aerial Surveys, one of the companies that flies the UltraCam that captures the imagery you see in Virtual Earth today. Throughout we’ll interview a number of the people who work with this camera including Ken Potter, Executive Vice President and Neil DiFranco, Project Manager at Keystone. Neil, who himself is a Survey Pilot, will show us how they do flight planning with an aerial camera which is very different than what a regular pilot does and will demo the software they use to do it. Later Neil will take us on a flight and we’ll meet Ben Miller, one of their operators who will talk about how the UltraCam and the flight management software work together. He’ll show us all the steps during the flight and show us the UltraCam in action! After our flight we’ll meet David Day, Director of IT for Keystone, who will walk us through what happens to the imagery when it gets back on the ground and how they process it before it is sent to Boulder for the next step in its journey and the subject of our next episode. This was a really fun video to make. Generally I like to keep these videos as simple as possible and if I can do the entire thing in one take. This one was different. There is a TON of content we cover and I probably should have made this into three separate videos. But seeing as this is the internet age and everyone wants everything right now I decided to make it into one long video. It runs nearly an hour but I promise there is a ton of great information on the UltraCam and we go into deep detail on each step in how it is used to capture the high resolution aerial imagery. What you also may not realize is there is a bunch of technology that goes into the flight planning, the operation of the camera and the flight software in the air and the post-processing of the imagery. I think you’ll find this episode fascinating and I do hope you all enjoy it. Behind The Maps - Flying the UltraCam
|
-
-
One of our Microsoft partners Inca X is working with the Pelican Racing Team to track it at the Cowes Week Regatta, August 2-9. Cowes is the longest running Regatta in the world, didn’t ya know. The fun gets started this Saturday, 10:00 GMT. That’s 8am for us here in Seattle. The solution that the Pelican Team is using for this race is the Inca X Live Media GPS. This takes a mobile phone and does live video streaming as well as supplies the GPS coordinates which are then displayed in Microsoft Virtual Earth. Phil Bishop, the CTO for Inca X puts it best… "Our Live Media GPS application allows anyone to broadcast their current activities directly from a mobile phone. The broadcasts are directly linked to Virtual Earth so that your precise location and movements can be mapped. You can share all this information with your chosen audience, be it public or private.” If you want to watch the races this week and get both the broadcast media from the boat as well as the Virtual Earth view of where they are on the map check them out here, http://www.ix-m.com/pelican/. The action gets started at 10:00 GMT so us Yanks had better not go have too many beers tonight at the pub. 
|
-
Today we announced that Microsoft Virtual Earth will be offered within ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop product. The ArcGIS Desktop integration gives you another way to leverage the incredible imagery and base maps to visualize your data. To publish using ArcGIS Server you’ll still need a Virtual Earth license. Read below for our Press Release and for more information and also check out our published FAQ as well. Microsoft Virtual Earth to Be Offered with ESRI’s ArcGIS Online Services Mapping platform collaboration helps improve business processes, unlock and gain insight into data, and create better citizen and customer connections Redmond, Wash., and Redlands, Calif. — July 29, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. and ESRI today announced that ESRI ArcGIS users will have access to the robust mapping and imagery content provided by the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform inside ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server. With Virtual Earth seamlessly integrated into ArcGIS 9.3 Desktop, ArcGIS users are now able to easily add base maps, which feature rich aerial and hybrid views, to perform data creation, editing, analysis, authoring, and map publishing with one-click access. “Microsoft and ESRI have a long-standing history of delivering complete geographic information systems solutions,” said Erik Jorgenson, corporate vice president at Microsoft Corp. “The integration of Virtual Earth and ArcGIS 9.3 at both desktop application and platform levels enables customers to better view, analyze, understand, interpret, and visualize geographic data. This new offering further extends the software-plus-services choices available to our mutual customers.” “With the new ArcGIS Online Virtual Earth map services, ArcGIS Desktop, and ArcGIS Explorer users will have nearly instant access to some of the world’s finest base map layers,” said S.J. Camarata, Director of Corporate Strategies at ESRI. “Through this collaboration with Microsoft, street maps, vertical imagery, and hybrid maps will be available on an affordable, annual subscription fee basis.” Together, Virtual Earth and ArcGIS Online services will enable customers to access resources that add comprehensive depth to their projects. The seamless integration of Virtual Earth throughout the entire ArcGIS system makes it easier for ArcGIS customers to offer their end-users better insight into their services, which can inspire deeper involvement and participation with their valuable GIS data. The ArcGIS Online Virtual Earth map services will include high-resolution street maps, imagery, and hybrid maps. Street map coverage is available for more than 60 countries and regions including North America, Europe, South America, the Asia Pacific region, and Northern Africa. Aerial and satellite imagery includes worldwide coverage, but varies by region. ESRI integrates with other Microsoft products that may be part of a user’s Virtual Earth solution to incorporate internal and third-party data—making information more discoverable, more visual, and better to take action upon. Land planning, site selection, crime analysis, road network analysis, and delivery network management are just few examples of how ArcGIS desktop users, including ArcGIS Explorer users, can leverage ArcGIS Online Virtual Earth map services. ArcGIS Server users will be able to connect to ArcGIS Online Virtual Earth Map Services at a later date, through a service pack. Users can preview Virtual Earth street maps, imagery, and hybrid map layers at http://resources.esri.com/arcgisonlineservices. To learn more about ArcGIS Online, visit www.esri.com/arcgisonline. About Microsoft Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. About ESRI Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.
|
-
At long last it is FINALLY HERE. I’ve been talking about this control for a long time. We’ll we finally have the CTP release of the new Virtual Earth ASP.NET control. ASP.NET developers can now integrate Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps simply by dragging and dropping an ASP.NET Server Control in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer. Integrating interactive, immersive maps no longer requires JavaScript, it can be done by ASP.NET developers simply. For smooth interactions this control can be combined with ASP.NET AJAX capabilities to provide the power of ASP.NET Serverside processing without the development overhead of coding JavaScript. I’ll provide all the relevant links here at the top but you should check at the bottom to make sure you have all the prerequisites. Key Links Feature Overview · Visual Studio toolbox - Map control is available right in your toolbox of Visual Studio 
· Drag and drop control onto your web page - You can drag and drop the control from toolbox onto your web page and set some properties and you are ready to go.  
· Server side events - Server side events for panning/zooming, find/directions are available in addition to client side events for the map control.  
· Display and control the map - You can control how map displays on your web page with standard functionality like MapMode (2D/3D), MapStyle(Road/Aerial), displaying dashboard and setting its size, setting the zoom levels, zooming in/out, panning etc. · Adding shapes to the map - You can add shapes to map from ASP.NET Server Side using provided methods. You can query different shapes/layers in the Map and delete them as well. · Using directions - You can get the directions between multiple points using methods GetDirections. You can specify different routing options like distance unit, color etc. Once the direction information is received, Map control raises event OnServerDirections where you can process/render the returned information in way that suites your scenario. 
· Using local search and mapping results - Map control provides with find method where you can search for local businesses in a specified location. 
· Working with bird's eyes - Map control has support for bird's eye view similar to JavaScript control. · Getting Traffic information - You can get traffic information and display on your web page. For this, you need to have an account with Virtual Earth Platform. You first need to get a client token: Important: To get a Developer Evaluation account for Virtual Earth go to this link here and request one, https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/ 
· You can then use this client token to display the traffic of the location you are interested in: 
Development stage The suite of tools is currently a community technology preview, which means we would love feedback, but strongly discourage any web site from going live using these controls. Requirements for Using Windows Live Tools This CTP release only targets English (United States). Operating System - Microsoft Windows XP SP 2 or
- Microsoft Windows Vista
Development Tools Key Links
|
-
The nice folks at GeoWeb stopped by my booth at GeoWeb on Thursday asking, how the geoweb can contribute to better planning and management of our cities. Well in fact, there are lots of great examples of State and Local Governments who use Virtual Earth to help in exactly this way. The City of Miami uses Virtual Earth to visualize their parcel, flood and permit data for commercial and other developers to accurately get information. Check it out here.
|
-
Over the last few months since I’ve been on the Virtual Earth team I become friends with Ed Katibah. Ed works on the SQL Spatial team and is one of those guys who lives and breathes what he loves and what he loves is Spatial Databases. He also loves talking about them and I find that when I’m hanging out with Ed I learn a lot. When I first met Ed he was doing some blogging, then he stopped. Myself and a number of people like James Fee have been working him over this past week at GeoWeb to start blogging again. After all, there is too much good stuff up in that head of his to not share and with our release of SQL Spatial there is much the Microsoft developer community can learn from Ed about how to design and build spatial databases. Well I guess our convincing worked because “Spatial Ed” has started blogging again. Keep it up Ed. We definitely enjoy it.
|
-
Well we've finally done it! We now have a way for you to create or import your own models and put them into Virtual Earth using truSpace which comes from Caligari who we brought into Microsoft not too long ago. Not only that but you can get truSpace for FREE. You can also import models you have already from many of the popular 3D modeling tools into truSpace and then upload them right into Virtual Earth. So get it for FREE today. Chris Pendleton has all the details. This is a long post but includes step-by-step instructions on how to load your 3D models into Virtual Earth so it's worth a read and also includes a great video showing how you could use truSpace to create a virtual retail environment. --Enjoy!
|
-
The folks at GeoWeb are walking around with a camera and asking many of the speakers, industry heavy hitters and even me questions about the Geo Industry. Each day there is a different question. For today’s query the question is: “Do you see the activities of the major search engines as a threat or an opportunity for the rest of the industry?” They also interviewed Ed Katibah from Microsoft’s SQL Spatial team with the question: “What are the major impediments in your view to the broader sharing of geographic information?" There are also a ton more of these with some leading industry folks also answering the same questions as Ed and I here. The videos are short at about a minute each and definitely worth checking out.
|
-
Chris has the details on our most recent imagery update. It’s a small release but if you live in Belgium Denmark, Spain and a few other countries there are some significant updates here. Check it out on Chris’ blog. Happy mapping…
|
-
I’m up in Vancouver, BC this week for the GITA GeoWeb conference. I will be presenting with Ed Katibah on all things Virtual Earth and SQL Spatial. Ed Katibah, Principal Program Manager - SQL Server Spatial, Mark Brown, Senior Product Manager - Virtual Earth,
Microsoft has made significant R&D investments over the past few years in an effort to build the best geospatial platform in the world and there is some incredible technology behind it all. Join us as we’ll go deep on the three main areas of R&D Microsoft has done. In this session we’ll explore the upcoming release of SQL Server Spatial and go into detail on how being the last to market allowed us to create an architecture that represents technology-forward thinking in Spatial database design and the benefits it brings the next generation of Spatial application design. Next we will discuss the investments Microsoft’s has made in aerial camera technology as well as the R&D in our 2D and 3D image and data processing that provides the underlying rich platform within Virtual Earth. And finally we will show you the fruits of our labor and show you the applications that can now be built using the entire Virtual Earth Platform with SQL Spatial together. Should be fun. I think we are the only workshop session that is SOLD OUT so no pressure. And I should be getting some sleep as my session is at 9am tomorrow and it’s after 11pm here now.
|
-
It’s been a good week for awesome content again here in Virtual Earth land. Marc Schweigert I swear is some kind of Transformer Robot because he cranks out killer demos and samples like a machine is at it again. Here’s a picture of Marc there on the left. This time he’s got two screen casts for us. The first one shows how to save a polygon drawn in Virtual Earth to SQL Spatial. The second one shows how to render polygons SQL Spatial into Virtual Earth. Btw, if you’re curious you should go check out his other posts on Virtual Earth. There’s a bunch of great stuff to dig into if you’re looking for some great samples to get you ramped on building applications with Virtual Earth. One other thing that I have to point out too is a GeoRSS library that Marc used which was originally written by Eugenio Pace who is an Architect here at Microsoft in DPE. They created it as part of the reference application they work they do. In this case, for the Litware HR reference application showing multitenancy on the Microsoft platform. This is out on Code Plex, go check that out too. Enjoy. I know I’m going to have some fun this weekend playing with this as well as digging into some old toys and playing Transformers too.
|
-
One of my friends at Microsoft, Glen Gordon in our US Developer and Platform Evangelism Team (DPE) turned me on to something really cool they just did. If you didn’t know these guys are constant road warriors presenting at events across the US. They just created a new website called, Community Megaphone that has a complete listing of all upcoming Developer Events across the US. It’s got some nice features such as allowing you to add events to your Outlook Calendar, but the BEST FEATURE is the ability to get a map of the location using Virtual Earth.  And if that wasn’t enough they went a step further. They also went and built and RSS Feed that includes GeoRSS. This allows anybody to import the feed into Live Maps Collection. He didn’t stop there though. This gets even cooler because with the data in GeoRSS and if you have one of these new Windows Mobile phones that has a GPS built into it you can now use your phone to see if there are any Developer Events close to you. Here’s a little screen shot of what it looks like on the phone but check out his post for all the details on how you can do this too.
Enjoy
|
|
|
|
