If you are interested in using the new Virtual Earth Asp.Net control, then Soul Solutions have created a nice set of examples (with downloadable source) that are well worth exploring. Having the VE control as well as the JS control (and the Silverlight developments such as Views and the forthcoming managed control) really widens your options for using Virtual Earth.  This server control is well designed, offers both client and server support and takes advantages of the Extenders model so implementation can be really easy.  Definitely worth a look. Cheers Ian...

http://www.codeplex.com/TAACA http://theamazingalbumcoveratlas.org/ If you would like to get involved, please let me know and I will add you as a developer. Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth,VIEWS

I have been doing a lot of work with this wrapper (called VIEWS, and available here: http://codeplex.com/views) - it really makes life a lot easier for working with VE in Silverlight, and will no doubt point the way towards how the final Silverlight VE control will work. I recommend checking it out, and watching this intro video from Jared Bienz is a good start Virtual Earth Mapping in Silverlight with VIEWS   Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Virtual Earth

http://theamazingalbumcoveratlas.org/ The excellent Word Magazine recently created an album cover atlas which shows locations of famous album covers.  Cool idea, but I didn't like the basic google maps interface.  So as an exercise and to also help spike out some work we are doing on www.lovecleanstreets.org I created a quick Virtual Earth and Silverlight version that make use of the VIEWS VE managed wrapper for Silverlight. Luckily the original developer, Ian Reeves used a REST service to get the data, so I was able to work with the same live data for my project.  There was no...

I have noticed that more and more places in the UK are getting the 3D treatment in Virtual Earth, but there doesn't seem to be a list of all of them (at least I couldn't find one).  The UK models do not yet support the recent enhancements that some of the US cities have (such as Denver or Las Vegas) where vegetation is modelled as well as the buildings, but I expect that it is just a matter of time. So anyway I have created a collection of places in the UK where I have spotted 3D models - bear in...

We have just released an updated version of the VE JavaScript Intellisense Helper which supports version 6.1 of VE. I also received a mail from Roger Chapman who has completed a similar project for Google Maps Oh and for those of us in the UK who were shocked to see VE replaced by Multimap for a few days, you will be glad to know this has now been reverted! Cheers Ian   del.icio.us Tags: Virtual Earth,Google Maps Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth,Google Maps

There is currently no api method for turning a Virtual Earth Collection from maps.live.com into a GeoRss file. However there is a workaround that you can use as follows: Open your collection on maps.live.com Click the Share button and select either "Send in e-mail" or "Copy to clipboard" - what you want is the URL for the collection Visit the URL in the clipboard or the e-mail - it will be something like: http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=FB8B852EF1AB0B35!519&encType=1  When the collection is displayed you will see a Subscribe link at...

Virtual Earth has a great api, better than Google Maps IMHO, but JavaScript is PITA if you have no editor support.  VS2008 has brought Intellisense to many JavaScript scenarios, but not to VE development - up until now that is. A Code Plex project (that I had the pleasure to be involved in, though in a tiny tiny way, because the project was completed so quickly! - I expect to be more involved in future iterations) has made it easy to have JavaScript Intellisense for VE in Visual Studio. The Virtual Earth: An Evangelist's Blog has a good...