Blog List

Earlier this month at Australia’s first Silverlight Code Camp I showed a simple invert pixel effect applied to the base road map layer of Bing Maps. At the time I challenged the audience to look at pixel shaders to further customise and integrate Bing Maps into their applications. Today Nokola posted a sample Hue Shift pixel shader with source code.





http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/hueshift/

I couldn’t help but quickly apply the effect to the Bing Maps control with some nice results. Rather then apply to the whole control I’m applying the shader in code to just the base layer, this means that pins and navigation controls are not effected:

effect = new ShiftHueEffect(); map.Mode.Content.Effect = effect; map.ModeChanged += (e, o) => map.Mode.Content.Effect = effect; The ultimate for me would be a shader that allowed the designer to selectively change the key base layer colours to those of their choosing. Thanks to Nokola I think I now know the right direction to take.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Pixel Shader,Silverlight

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Nicolas Boonaert’s book on Bing Maps has been released and it looks awesome! Nicolas lives in France and is an active developer in the Bing Maps community.



The book is in French, but amazingly I can still understand much of it :) It covers quite a bit in 450 pages:

History, including TerraServer, MapPoint Web Service and Virtual Earth Architecture of the platform AJAX control Silverlight Bing Maps Web Service Building Mobile applications 3rd Party Projects, including DeepEarth Comparison with Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and OSM. If your interested in Bing Maps or web mapping in general and can read French this is a must. If you don’t speak French but this sort of title interests you, then ping Nicolas and encourage him to do an English translation, he is on twitter here. Great work Nicolas!

Technorati Tags:...

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Good news for all Bing Maps developers with windows update 979202 solving a major performance issue.

CPU usage is high when you use the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight 3. This problem occurs when the Deep Zoom feature cannot load or decode a tile. The problem persists even if you minimize the Web browser in which the Silverlight 3 application is running.

This would occur if you had either :

1. a custom tile layer that would return 404 errors when tiles were requested (typical for a simple file system on edge tiles that don’t exist but are still requested by the control) or
2. if you disabled the coverage map of the base layers and zoomed into the non-covered area.

Additionally my tests prove that an additional problem with animations causing the MSI control to redraw have also been solved.

This is great news and allows us to do some clever things with dynamic tile layers and animated icons on the map without major performance hits. I hope to share some of these with you in coming posts.

This week I caught up with Laura Diaz from NAVTEQ to chat about how Bing Maps developers can win their share of US 10 million dollars in the global LBS Challenge. This is the first year that web based applications can be submitted and with Microsoft’s Bing Maps use of NAVTEQ data the ideal platform to build your entry is clear.

Your browser does not support iframes, download the MP3 directly below.

You can download the mp3 here.

“First launched in 2003, the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is focused on driving the development and visibility of innovative location-based solutions (LBS) for wireless devices. The Global LBS Challenge has become the premier event in the wireless industry and a global symbol of LBS innovation and opportunity. From business applications to sports, travel and security, integrating the accuracy and richness of NAVTEQ digital map data facilitates the discovery of the next wave of LBS using dynamic positioning technology.”

Highlights:

$10,000,000 in prizes consists of cash and data licenses. Real opportunity to meet some of the top companies in this field. Competition is broken into regions, must register soon, North America closes 20th November! Web applications can simple be submitted as a working URL Mobile applications making it to the next round will get a sponsored device if they choose that device in their entry. Open to non-commercial applications With the release of the new Bing Maps Silverlight control will we see some very cool entries?  

For more information visit the competition homepage...

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Here at Tech Ed Australia 2009 we are presenting on the Bing Maps Silverlight control, it’s session WEB302. If you’re in the crowd or simply reading this after the event you can follow along with our demos here.



http://about.soulsolutions.com.au/

First up is a little visualisation of where we work and play. This data is hard coded into the application and took less then an hour to put together. The minimap, custom navigation and custom image pin are part of the open source DeepEarth project.

 



http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net/

...

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Sarah Vaughan, the Windows 7 Group Lead in Australia, today demonstrated our Silverlight 3 / Windows 7 Multi touch application in the keynote of the Australian Partner Conference.



The Silverlight application is built on top of Bing Maps and uses our open source controls called DeepEarth. This particular application allows you to annotate the map, drawing polygons and lines and adding points. All of this data can be captured and stored into a SQL 2008 database. We added a custom tile layer of the exhibition venue itself.

In order to support multi touch you need to be running Windows7 and have a multi touch enabled screen and drivers. HP, the hardware sponsors of the event supplied the nice screen Sarah is using and also lent us a TouchSmart Tx2 tablet for the development.



If you have such a device you can see the application here (works with just a mouse as well):

http://multitouch.soulsolutions.com.au/

The gestures are:

pinch zoom in / out 2 finger swipe left / right to show / hide the drawing panel 2 finger hold 1/2 sec for AerialwithLabels, 3 finger hold for road, 4 for plain aerial. Drag the map with one finger. One thing to note is that multi touch doesn’t currently work in full screen mode.

Commercially we are working with a Mining Company here...

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Just an update to the sessions we’re presenting and activities we’re involved in at Tech.Ed Australia this year on the Gold Coast.

WEB 302 - Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control  Wed 9/9/2009 13:45-15:00 in Meeting Room 7 Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) provides a slick and powerful data visualisation engine for your spatial information. Join John O'Brien for a look at how the core control can be combined with other Silverlight components including DeepEarth and Photosynth to produce a rich and engaging interface. See how SQL Server 2008 spatial data can be rendered in real time and how this whole interface can be integrated into your Sharepoint site.

THG007 - 3 the New Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit for Social Websites Thu 10/9/2009 15:00-15:30 in Green Interactive Theatre

See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and build brand loyalty.

WIT Women in IT Wed 9/9/2009 12:45-13:45

Hosted by Catherine Eibner, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Dynamics, Women in IT is about growing strong female leaders in the IT industry. Leading women in IT and industry experts will lead discussions...

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We the release of Silverlight3 I thought I would share this skunk works project I have been working on. We have the Photosynth Silverlight control running inside our Silverlight3 application. We pull all the geo-referenced synths and display them on a Bing Maps CTP Silverlight control. You will see two types of icons, the big ones are clusters with many synth, zoom in till you get a smaller leaf, click on this to load the synth using some Silverlight3 magic.

http://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au/

So go and explore all the public synths throughout the world! My favourites are:

• Pyramids at Giza
• Machu Pichu Peru
• London Eye
• Mount Rushmore
• Statue of Liberty

Let me know what you think of the more integrated experience and how you think Photosynth should be better integrated spatially.

What are your favourite locations?

I’m pleased to announced my project has launched for the Azure #newcloudapp international competition. Its called Traffic in the Cloud and provides a rich interactive location twist on public webcams throughout the world.



So what makes this new and worth checking out? Well apart from the slick DeepZoom Silverlight control  (you need another reason?) here is why:

Give context to the camera images, browse by location and see what is happening live around the world. Sit back and enjoy a tour around the world. An Azure worker process caches 10 frames of each camera so you can now add some motion to your view even if the source website doesn’t. Those frames are made into a sprite as recommended by Jose Farjardo which means CPU usage and scalability rocks You can add your own cameras by signing in with a LiveID and filling out a simple form (Approval is needed before it goes live) All the controls used are available open source from the DeepEarth project on Codeplex....

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I always struggle to find the full list of SQL 2008 Spatial methods for Geography when I need them so this is really just a helper post so I can find them again later but maybe it will help you also. Since they are case sensitive and don’t have intelisence I can never remember the syntax.

STArea STAsBinary STAsText STBuffer STDifference STDimension STDisjoint STDistance STEndpoint STEquals STGeometryN STGeometryType STIntersection STIntersects STIsClosed STIsEmpty STLength STNumGeometries...

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