BB10
Oct 30th, 2008
Deep Dive: Virtual Earth

Speakers

Mark Brown
Mr. Brown did a brief introduction of himself. He revealed that Virtual Earth 6.2 was just released. The session covered Virtual Earth Web Services v1.0.
What Is Virtual Earth?
Virtual Earth is an online mapping platform. Brown showed an overview of the components of the platform. Services are exposed through AJAX Control and Virtual Earth Web Services. A lot of business are already using the VE platform to power their business—from store locator to line-of-business applications.
Map Control
Virtual Earth offers access to both 2D and 3D world and image views.
It provides navigation, zoom, events, and call backs.
Key Elements
  • Shapes: can draw lines, point, shape, polygon, etc. They are placed on layers with custom pop-ups.
  • Find: Geocoding, points of interest, etc.
  • Routing: Multipoint routing, etc.
  • Integration: Vector data from KML, Live Search Map collection, etc.
Brown went over how to add VE to a Web page and showed HTML code with Javascript to load and show the map on the Web page.
Deep dive on Virtual Earth 6.2.
  • Imagery metadata API. (request info on the image such as provider and date taken)
  • Routing landmark hints (example: in the route, you could say, you will pass by a Burger King on the right-hand side)
  • Localized maps tiles (available in Europe and Japan, etc)
  • Pushpin clustering
Virtual Earth Web Services v1.0
  • Imagery service
  • Tiles
  • Meta data
  • Search service
  • Geocode service
  • Routing service
  • Common component
All requests that you make need to include credential and token information. You need to keep track of token expirations.
The speaker walked the group through the code to request a tile given a specific location. / Mentioned Technologies
  • Live Services

Advanced Virtual Earth Development
Example: A coffee business demo where coffee stores were shown on a Virtual Earth map as pushpins with custom graphics. Customer locations could also be represented as pushpins. The example used SQL spatial type to query for the number of customers within a 3-mile radius of a given store. We were then walked through the code on how to load store data from a JSON file, use map control to show with custom pushpins, and do a spatial query in SQL Server.

List of demos

Virtual Earth 6.2 control features / Routing landmark and general routing code. Localized tiles. Pushpin clustering. / Beginning of session
Virtual Earth Web Services v1.0 / Going through request static tiles.
Geocode search and reverse geocode search.
Search services.
Routing service. Major routes. / About 15min into session

Joe Chiu