From Virtual Earth to the Moon

The opening gambit slide in Brian Arbogast's session at MIX 06 on the Windows Live Platform was: Opening Windows Live services to create shared opportunity for developers and businesses.

Later this week I'll continue to post more details from the Windows Live Platform demos I presented in that session. As a kick start to the details around the Virtual Earth demos, here are some useful tips and resources. When using Virtual Earth (or Windows Live Local which is powered by Virtual Earth), hold down the Alt key plus the left mouse button while creating a box with the mouse to create a box to zoom into. The R key is a hot key for Road mode, A for Aerial, and B for Bird's Eye view (if enabled). I received this tip from Alex Daley, Virtual Earth technical evangelist. I met with Alex about a week ago to show him the demo being worked on for the Windows Live Platform demos. Alex's Virtual Earth developer blog as well as the Windows Live Local Space are great resources for Virtual Earth news and technical information, as well as the Via Virtual Earth site.

Virtual Earth is a service with great APIs for developers evolving back from MapPoint APIs. For a great article on programming Virtual Earth, check out the xml.com article by Dare Obasanjo called An AJAX- and REST-Powered Virtual Earth Mashup.