Next weekend, I'll be heading off to this year's PDC (Professional Developer's Conference) where I'll be manning the booth for Virtual Earth, plus just taking in some of the general awesomeness.

If you're going to be in Los Angeles for PDC, you should definitely drop by -- Virtual Earth has some of the best demos...and last year we had plush frogs...mmm, swag. Also make sure you sign up for Mark Brown's session "Deep Dive on Virtual Earth", 10/30 @ 1:45 pm in 408A; Mark'll be going into depth on all the new features in Virtual Earth 6.2 & the Virtual Earth Web Services v1.0.

See you at PDC!

One of the real differentiating features of Virtual Earth over competitors is the oblique or ‘Bird’s Eye’ imagery. It provides a really incredible view of the world. Heck, looking at my house, I can see my car clearly in the driveway. Here’s an example of the view of the Microsoft campus.

Read more »

Link: http://totusterra.com/VESamples/InputtingACircle.htm

One notable gap in Virtual Earth's set of tools is the ability to draw circles. Points, lines, polygons -- they have those covered, but circles remain on the 'to do' list. That might seem odd - given that VE uses SVG to render the shapes, and SVG supports circles - but remember that we're not dealing with a flat surface here, and circles can end up being distinctly ellipsish after projection. So just exposing 'circle' as an SVG shape type wouldn't really solve the problem.

A reasonable work-around is to treat circles like a polygon, with points along the circumference calculated individually. This way any weirdness in shape is automatically calculated and accounted for. Today, then, I'm going to step through the logic behind it and build a fun little demo that not just draws a circle, but lets you use a 'click and drag' to interactively create one on the map. With SQL Server 2008 offering spatial queries, I can see this becoming a popular way of interacting with data.

So, let's get started.

Read more »

Link: http://totusterra.com/VESamples/FlyBy/flyby.htm

Today's cool little demo is using Virtual Earth to track a moving object, keeping that object at the middle of the screen and then moving the map around it.

Read more »

Link: http://totusterra.com/VESamples/drawpoly.htm

Today I received a question from a customer about how to draw a polygon onto a Virtual Earth map, and I think this is a great topic to touch on because it gets to something I feel is under-represented when we talk about Virtual Earth. We often talk about Virtual Earth as the 'presentation layer' for surfacing data on a map -- but it's just as valuable as a data input tool.

Read more »