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It is actually very easy to display gigabytes of custom imagery on Bing Maps with fantastic results, the trick is to know what tools to use. Read on for a streamlined process for the common geo image formats using Global Mapper, SpaceBlock, Windows Azure and a few helpful tips along the way.



At Bing Map’s core is the ability to render really large images in your browser. Both the AJAX, Silverlight and Mobile versions all use a concept of a tile pyramid to make this possible and effective over the web, you can read more about the tile system in great detail here. Today we are going to look at a process I use to process custom imagery to overlay Bing maps.



In the GIS field these custom images are called raster images and come in various file formats like...

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

I’ve been exploring some of the fantastic Silverlight panel systems out there and was blown away by the Drag Dock Panel in the open source Blacklight project.





See the full demo here:

http://soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/blacklight/

It is very impressive and makes you rethink how you may design your next LOB Bing Maps application. The panel system lets you add as many elements as your like and then drag them around or impressively make one larger with the other stacked up:



Imagine a tracking application where you could allow the user to dynamically add new map panes and in real time track many assets individually.



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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

For our July Girl Geek Dinner we're heading to The Hutch Bistro at New Farm and we're fortunate to have Kay Lam-Beattie as our guest speaker.  So gather all of your legal/IT questions to ask Kay on the night!



About Kay:

Kay graduated from QUT in 1992 with a Bachelor of Business (Accountancy) and an honours degree in Law. To obtain more specialised skills, Kay also completed a Masters in Law concentrating on the areas of intellectual property (IP) and IT-related legal issues, as well as a Graduate Certificate in IT.

Kay has been the principal of IDEALAW (and its predecessor Legal Capital Lawyers) since 2005.

Kay’s broadly based academic qualifications places her in an ideal position not only to understand the intricacies of her specialist areas of IT and IP related law, but also technical IT and business issues. Kay also speaks conversational Japanese, having lived and worked in Japan for a number of years.

Who is invited?

If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women in IT.

Who pays for dinner? This month is not sponsored so you will have to pay for your own dinner

Where + When Date: Thursday 2nd July, 2009 Time: 7:00 pm Where: The Hutch Bistro

75 Welsby Street, New Farm

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

I downloaded the sample app for the Windows Live Messenger bits in preparation for our talk at Remix next week.  If you haven’t played with it, the WebToolkit Sample site is a great starting place!  There’s a couple of things you have to do to get them running so I thought it’d be a good idea to write these down for others.

Firstly, you’ll need an application id, so make sure you go to the Azure Services Developer Portal: https://lx.azure.microsoft.com/Cloud/Provisioning/Default.aspx and create a new project with a Live Services: Existing APIs type. Make sure you remember the domain name and URL you chose e.g. I picked remixdemo.com.au and return URL of http://remixdemo.com.au/Messenger/Default.aspx and also note down your app_id and secret key as you’ll need them to run the samples.

Make sure you add an entry in your hosts file for the domain you chose so you can run the application locally.  To do this open notepad as administrator, and open the hosts file located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and create an entry like: 127.0.0.1    remixdemo.com.au

Next, I went to IIS and created a virtual directory called Messenger and pointed it to the SampleSite. To run the application I browsed to http://remixdemo.com.au/messenger/Default.aspx.

Make sure you setup your site in the web.config to use your app_id,...

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

Fonts Setting fonts used to be a bit painful but I’ve found it quite easy in WPF.  In my project I’ve copied the font files into a directory structure: \Resources\Fonts and I have a font file masanreg.ttf which contains the font called MasonSansRegular.

To use the font in Xaml if just reference the path to the font and the font name prefixed with a # e.g.

FontFamily="./Resources/Fonts/#MasonSansRegular"

You can also see the list in Blend under the Text section