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Lots of Virtual Earth and Silverlight Development Outside of Microsoft

  • Artigo

image I'm seeing lots of Virtual Earth integration in Silverlight light. And, I have to say I LOVE IT. Today is no exception. IDV Solutions just launched their Silverlight Map Viewer which is their new interface for their Visual Fusion Server product. This is a big move for IDV as most of their stack is Microsoft technology and the Flash interface was one of the remaining artifacts in moving to a complete Microsoft stack. What else? How about Soul Solutions who published Deep Earth on CodePlex? Deep Earth is an open source community project that combines the interactive experience in Silverlight 2 Deep Zoom with photo tiles from Virtual Earth. This actually featured on Channel 9 - "DeepEarth: Virtual Earth using Silverlight Deep Zoom." IS Consulting makers of MapDotNet have their own MapDotNet Silverlight interface for Virtual Earth and GIS data, as well. Infusion Development has invested quite a bit of time in Virtual Earth (as you may have noticed in the Virtual Earth Developer Forums) and has developed a few applications already using Silverlight.

I get posed the question all the time, "Chris, when is Microsoft going to release the Microsoft Virtual Earth Silverlight Control?" At this point, I'm not sure we have to! Silverlight and some undocumented / unsupported functionality from Virtual Earth make for some powerful applications from our development community. Oh, it's the "undocumented/unsupported" piece that makes you nervous? Well, let me take care of that; however, I'm starting to think that maybe I recommend backing off the product group's investment in Silverlight and Virtual Earth. Thoughts?

CP

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2008
    A few questions. First, does the recognition of the DeepEarth project mean it is ok to just use the tiles like that from the ortho servers? Second, why would Microsoft not want to distribute a fully supported VE control for Silverlight? While I am all for people developing their own creations, going to a customer and saying "oh, we are using Jack Smiths Ultra VE Control for that" would make most of our customers a little uneasy. If it is Microsoft's intention to just let the community fill this void, then I guess we are back to square one and developing in house solutions for this problem. One other concern, a casual developer will find implementing some of the basic VE features a monumental task, for example, kml support, shapes, driving directions, etc.

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2008
    Thanks Chris for the plug. The project is very new and the now 10 developers from all around the world are busily creating all sorts of rich functionality in native Silverlight2 (XAML and C#). For those that look today and don't see what they want please do check back for our first release. I believe that in order to provide maximum flexibility and let developers truely innovate ontop of Virtual Earth Microsoft needs to provide the most basic of services, rich imagery and proper data webservices. That said most developers are going to want a reference project that does all the ground work for them. I'm hoping DeepEarth can help with that. I will be restructuring the code this weekend and making it more clear that it is not supported to use VE tiles directly, you need to contact VE licensing to do this.

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2008
    You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    We're going to have fully supported WPF and Silverlight map controls that support Virtual Earth on the market very soon.  We've got some unreal demos already, and several 'real live' customer solutions in development as we speak. I am quite glad to see you suggest, Chris, that Microsoft will consider what the VE partners are offering when planning what tools it will provide.  Otherwise, it would be difficult for us that endeavor to offer companion and compatible products for fear of being overshadowed.   This is a discussion we've been having with our partner manager, and have looked for ways to open the discussion up.  Now that you have done that for us Chris, soon after your announcement regarding the legal and direct access to VE tiles, you are in an important position to help the VE partner community substantially.  I'd like to see this discussion continue, it isn't restricted to Silverlight support, and I'd like to offer my assistance in coordinating with other VE partners to make sure that we can all continue to offer companion products in the future.  Let me know what I can do Chris!  We'd all hate to see Microsoft waste valuable resources on duplicative efforts. :-]

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    Chris, Thanks for the reply. I don't agree with your thoughts in your comment at all. The reason there are quite a few of these silverlight/wpf controls popping up is because Microsoft has yet to release a product. Just because you develop a Silverlight control for VE does not mean you are excluding other languages, or that it is Microsoft only. Sure, the Silverlight control itself would be Microsoft only, but other companies are free to develop controls for their platform, no? Since Silverlight and WPF controls are supposed to be interchangeable, only one control should be necessary. Without a fully supported product from Microsoft, I don't see VE maturing. Imagine if you didn't provide the web control for VE, how many applications do you think would be out there? As a developer, I don't want to have to think about what projection the tiles are in or what the lat/lon is in x,y space. Why should I care about that when the end goal would possibly be to show some points and maybe driving directions? I think people want a control, from Microsoft, that is easy to use and ready to go once dropped into a project. Otherwise, sad to say, I think people will move on to something else.

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    Well said JoeS.  I agree completely.

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2008
    Another one [ComponentOne] http://labs.componentone.com/Silverlight/Factories/ :)

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2008
    A few months back I posted about Lots of Virtual Earth and Silverlight Development Outside of Microsoft

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2008
    One issue with including the token in the url is it affects our caching.  Because the token changes so frequently, our program is not using the built in cache abilities of WinInet. Will the sever accept posting the token Is there a way to POST the token parameter as application/x-www-form-urlencoded rather than including it in the url request?

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2008
    One issue with including the token in the url is it affects our caching.  Because the token changes so frequently, our program is not using the built in cache abilities of WinInet. Will the sever accept posting the token POST'ed as application/x-www-form-urlencoded rather than including it in the url request?

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2009
    There's a relevant webcast on MSDN called "Building Rich Interactive Mapping Applications with Virtual Earth, SQL Server 2008, and MapDotNet UX" on http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/silverlight.aspx that may be of interest.