How Live Search / Virtual Earth got us to the party on time!

So a few weeks ago I and most of the rest of the (Irish) Developer and Platform Group were in Orlando for a conference. We had an event to go to one evening after dinner so the five of us loaded into a cab...only to realise the exact address was umm so super-secret none of us had remembered to bring it with us (!) All we knew was that it was in a Harley Davidson factory shop which the taxi driver had never heard of.

So out came the Windows Mobile devices, straight to Live Search and search for "Harley Davidson" Orlando and sure enough it came back with a map, directions and so on - quite cool actually, you could even zoom in/out on the map on the mobile device. This was the first time I'd really used this sort of technology "for real" so I decided to take a closer look, and ended up at https://dev.live.com  

If you want to embed a map from Virtual Earth into your site it's really straightforward to do using the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK. It provides sample source code (javascript and html) which you can just cut and paste into a page, along with your co-ordinates and that's it. For example, below is a map, the centre of which is Carmenhall Road, where Microsoft Ireland is located. The code for this was copied from the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK page and pasted into this blog post. Check out the map, how you can easily zoom in or out, and switch from road to aerial to hybrid views (I've set the zoom pretty high on this for the road view so just zoom out for the hybrid). This is pretty much the simplest example from the SDK site, you can also show 3D maps, use events and callbacks, add navigation controls and so on, with sample code for all of them.