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For no reason whatsoever, I found myself wandering across to the “Bing Maps Silverlight Control Interactive SDK” today. It was a random moment when I probably should have been making myself a cup of tea but I’d seen the announcement on the Silverlight blog and I’d followed it through to the video that’s up here and I’d ( honestly ) not thought that I would get too excited about it. But I did. I’m very, very impressed by this new Silverlight control and I guess there’s 2/3 reasons that excite me about it; It’s much more pleasant to use and feels much more fluid and rich than the AJAX version. Here are the two versions side-by-side; Go run them both. Try them out. There’s a qualitative difference in the experience of these two things. It’s Silverlight. What that tells me is that I’ll have no problems compositing this [with/underneath/over-the-top-of] any other Silverlight content that I want like video, text, graphics, user interface, anything that I like. Mmmmm. It’s Silverlight. What that tells me is that I’ll...

Johannes Kerbeck and Simon Sabin are running an event around Virtual Earth in the Microsoft offices in London on April 16th. Sounds like an interesting take on things to me is that it seems to be angled more around taking spatial data and applying it in both places. More details from here . You won’t see me there though. I’ll be here .

I have this little command line app that I’ve been using to navigate my developer Mesh with the Live Framework SDK. It started out as very basic but then today I realised that I should really extend it so that you can use it something like; cd cloud list objects cd meshObject1 list objects and so on. I was about to set about doing this when I realised that this is essentially already part of Powershell and a much smarter move would be for me to write a plug-in provider for Powershell that exposed the local/cloud Live Operating Environment as something that can be navigated from the shell. Now…I didn’t actually set about it yet ( mostly because I realised that I’d have to download the entire Windows SDK to get going – can that be right? :-) ) If anyone goes ahead and builds it then let me know and I’ll link to it here, otherwise I’ll try and build it myself when “spare time” comes around.

This previous post had me thinking that the WPF application that I built across these posts; Live Framework SDK - More Steps Live Framework SDK - Having a Single MeshObject Live Framework SDK - Adding a Silverlight MEWA would start to improve if I offered the opportunity to "invite others" to shared groups of photographs. So, I re-worked the code. There were a couple of things that I came across whilst doing it; It's a bit painful that you can't do everything whilst created to the Local LOE. I wanted to write 100% of my code against the Local LOE but, because you can't get a list of Contacts from the Local LOE right now it means that you have to connect to the Cloud LOE to get them. Additionally, as far as I could tell you also need to use the Cloud LOE to send a user an invitation to share a MeshObject. I don't think you can do that with the Local LOE even if you already have gathered Contact information from the Cloud LOE. That was my finding, anyway. Mappings. I'm still not 100% sure about Mappings, MeshObjects...

Having written a small amount of WPF code for the previous post , I was wondering how hard it'd be to now write a Silverlight Mesh Enabled Web Application ( MEWA ) and access the same data that I was using from my WPF application. I set off down the route of building a Silverlight MEWA. So, in Visual Studio with the Live Framework Tools installed that's File->New Project; and then I did a quick Build to make sure I had something that was basically working and then I pressed F5 which sprung up this dialog; and that launched this dialog; which led me through visiting the developer portal; creating a new project up there; entering some details like the name (TestMewa), choosing to create a "MEWA" rather than a "Web Site", and then revisiting the dialog in Visual Studio and clicking the "Copy Link to ZIP file" entry; and then using that to upload the package on the website; which then gave me the Application's Self-Link to paste back into the dialog in Visual Studio; Visual Studio then did some uploading and launched...

Following up from the previous post where I'd been trying to write a little bit of code that shares some photographs via the Live Mesh using a standard, installed, client application written in WPF. That all worked out fine but the main problem that I encountered was that I wanted to have a single MeshObject ( let's call it Photos ) which had a single DataFeed that was used by all instances of my application. This is problematic as the client runs off the Local Live Operating Environment (LOE) which is not necessarily bang up to date with the Cloud LOE. So you can have a situation such as; Client runs on PC 1. Client checks its local LOE to see if the Photos MeshObject exists or not. Photos MeshObject does not exist so the client creates it. Client runs on PC 2. Client checks its local LOE to see if the Photos MeshObject exists or not. Photos MeshObject does not exist so the client creates it. Both clients are now happy but at some point they will synchronise with each other and they'll possibly never share any...

Following on from here , I thought I'd add a little bit of pushpin support to my basic Virtual Earth control for WPF. Essentially, I added a new property to the control called PushPins and each one of those is just a tuple of; { Latitude, Longitude, Text } to be placed on the map. This means that from XAML I can create a set of pushpins in a declarative way as in; <ve:VirtualEarth x:Name= "veControl" Grid.Column= "1" ZoomLevel= "{Binding Path=Value, ElementName=slidey}" Latitude= "{Binding Path=Text, ElementName=txtLat}" Longitude= "{Binding Path=Text, ElementName=txtLon}" MapStyle= "{Binding Path=Text, ElementName=cmbMapStyle}" > <ve:VirtualEarth.PushPins> <ve:PushPin Latitude= "47.6" Longitude= "-122.33" Text= "Seattle 1" /> <ve:PushPin Latitude= "47.7" Longitude= "-122.33" Text= "Seattle 2" /> <ve:PushPin Latitude= "47.8" Longitude= "-122.33" Text= "Seattle 3" /> </ve:VirtualEarth.PushPins> </ve:VirtualEarth> or I could databind them but either way in code if I want...

Fantastic demonstration from IDV solutions; http://silverlight.idvsolutions.com/ It'd be really cool to be able to copy a link once you've annotated a map and share it with someone else. I liked the flyout menus on the tools on the right hand side :-)