Blog List

We've been a bit lax in our blogging the last week...mainly because we were travelling around for Remix Australia.  For those who missed out you missed an awesome event! So I'll use this post to give my highlights of the events and to answer some of the common questions we were getting from you all around the ASP.Net Virtual Earth Control and the upcoming Contoso Bank Quick App.  We had a great time and it was really good for us both to be allowed to show some unreleased bits for the first (and 2nd if you were in Melbourne) time ever!

 Remix is coming to Australia - double strength.  There are 2 separate events in Australia this year. 20th May in Sydney, and 22nd in Melbourne. We're presenting a couple of demos at both events in the Windows Live session with Angus Logan. 

I posted my first dev article on liveside.net on the weekend, it all about making a panorama, using deep zoom, virtual earth and silverlight streaming.

Today I checked the reports on usage:

5,644 hits on the sample application in a few days! That could have been my entire server's bandwidth for the month (50GB).

  We were invited to present a guest lecture (2hrs) at QUT today on Web Applications in the Real World.  Our brief - show some cool demos and tell some stories about working in the real world. 

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All of a sudden my project stopped autogenerating the designer.cs files for all my page and controls in my Visual Studio 2008 project.  Apart from being really annoying it's just WRONG!

No matter what i did it wouldn't fix the designer.cs file.  So I started down the track of regenerating the files in a new project and then it happened again!

So I tried deleting the designer.cs file and right clicking on the page and choosing "Convert To WebApplication".

Blogging has been a bit light on this month. As you may have noticed we spent a lot of time travelling this month.  We discovered it takes as long to get from Brisbane to Montreal as it does to get from Montreal to Seattle. So a summary of what we got up to this month.

John was renewed as a Live Services Platform MVPBronwen presented at the Montreal Girl Geek DinnerWe did a workshop on Virtual EarthMuseums and the Web ConferenceJohn delivered a paper onExploring the National Gallery of Australia online database for prints and printmaking spatially The Prints and Printmaking site won Best of the Web - Research Category The MVP Summit attendee Virtual Earth mapWe got stuck in ChicagoWe both attended our first MVP summit and got to play with a surface May should have some exciting things.  We're speaking at Remix in Sydney and Melbourne so if you're going and want to catch up drop us a line.

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It has gone in a blur but it was exactly one year ago I was awarded an MVP for my community service to Windows Live Developers. Always fun to be awarded on April Fools Day. The name has changed, I'm now a Windows Live Platform MVP. Since then we have had several releases of Virtual Earth (and PetaBytes of new data), a VE exam released, QuickApps with sample code to learn from, ASP.NET 3.5 controls and many a name change.  I kept busy building the http://viawindowslive.com community site that so many of you have now contributed to with fellow MVP Bronwen Zande. We presented at various events in Australia, recently we travelled around Australia presenting 9 session on Virtual Earth and SQL 2008 Spatial. I took on the role of Moderator for the VE forums marking hundreds of posts as answered and clearing a few issues up here and there. Also there was a great community project to provide intellisence for Virtual Earth, I helped as much as I could. I've enjoyed helping people, meeting people and hearing your ideas and feedback. Of coarse my year has had negatives as well. I've learnt an important lesson that there are people out there that like to exploit hard working developers for their personal gain, taking credit for other peoples work and adding no value themselves. It is a real shame. So what lies ahead of us this year? Silverlight2 is going to play a huge part for many of us. Those that have come to know me will understand that I like new technology and visualisations of large data sets is a great challenge. With the news of a Silverlight version of Virtual Earth at Mix and tantalising deep zoom examples I hope to be sharing with all of you some very cool code this year. Will we see Photosynth this year? Will we have Silverlight Live controls? Will MSFT acquire Yahoo? A busy year it is sure to be.

Big thanks to Rose and the MVP team, it is a great program.

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Have had "fun" with the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayerl today..haven't found the solution..just all the symptoms.

So i've got a SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer, I've set it to point to an application on Silverlight Streaming, with autoplay OFF so it doesn't start playing as soon as you load the page...all works well.

Then I added a GridView which displayed thumbnails of all the videos I want to play, and when the user clicks on one i update the video and play it using the following javascript:

        function updatevideo(url)
    {
        var slMediaPlayer = $find("<%=CurrentSilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer.ClientID %>");
        slMediaPlayer.set_mediaSource(url);
        slMediaPlayer.set_autoPlay(true);
        return false;
    }

This also works a treat :)

My problem arrises in the following circumstance:

If I select a video from the list and then change pages the video starts from the beginning rather than keep playing.

If I play the default video and change pages, it continues on fine.

So it's remembering the video url property ok, but losing where the video is up to.  Will post back if I find a solution.

After touring the country, this week we are visiting the Brisbane SQL User Group to give our presentation on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth.  This is our 9th and final performance of this talk around Australia. Make sure you pay attention as we have some questions at the end to give our some swag.

Location Details: Microsoft Brisbane Office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle Street

Start Time: 6pm

Registration HERE

SQL Spatial with Virtual Earth

In this visually interactive talk we explore the new spatial data types, functions and indexes directly related to the real world using the interactive browser based Virtual Earth control. We focus on the new Geography data type providing an overview of the new functionality as directly applied to mapping. This includes the storage of points, polylines and polygons as well as real world tasks like effective rendering to the map, geofencing and proximity searches. We explore the power of union and buffering. Finally we examine the new index specifically built for fast spatial lookup.

The talk will inform, teach and demonstrate. You will understand what this new functionality is all about, what data types and functions are needed, how they operate and how to add an effective spatial index to your project.

I had someone read my Live Alert article today and ask me where to get the webservice from.  They are listed here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259725.aspx

Message: http://services.alerts.live.com/axis/services/Message?wsdl

Subscription: http://services.alerts.live.com/axis/services/Subscription?wsdl