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.

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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.

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As part of my job, I spend a lot of time working with the Microsoft Virtual Earth teams. Since version 6.2 of Virtual Earth just released, along with the new VE Web Services, I figured this is a good time for my first VE-related blog.

One aspect of the Virtual Earth infrastructure that hasn't received the attention it probably deserves is Client Tokens. A token is a unique value that can be used both for reporting map usage and acts as the authentication method used for some aspects of Virtual Earth functionality, plus the two related web service offerings - MapPoint Web Service (MWS) and the new Virtual Earth Web Service (VEWS).

I get a lot of questions about the tokens when I take calls from VE customers, and since it's becoming more important within the mapping platform, it seems like a good thing to spend just a little time providing nice, clean code for.

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I have in-laws staying with me this week, so I haven't been thinking about the blog much. So, here's an 'encore presentation' from one of my older defunct blogs.

This guy sure does hate Pachelbel.

Despite the craptacular history of Star Wars video games, I was really looking forward to the new Star Wars video game "The Force Unleashed". With the promise of a fully-realized story, the Euphoria graphics engine promising lots of flailing-stormtrooper goodness, and just general bad-assery, release day was tantalizing.

Then I saw this review:

Sometimes a review makes you think "well, maybe my experience will be different", but it looks like the game is just a shotgun full of fail. Hell, there's one point where the game testers obviously just ran out of time ("Bonus objective: Default Text" WTF?) but they figured "Ah, ship it anyway".

I'm ever so disappointed.