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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 … Continued

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 … Continued

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 … Continued

I’ve been using ListBoxes with IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem property set to True to do a lot of master/detail views recently.  When using MVVM with Command Pattern it’s wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to manipulate which item was selected when I added/removed … Continued

I’ve come across a few times when I want to change the layout and contents of my screen depending on what data I have in my object. I’ve found DataTriggers really useful for this.  Based on a field being populated … Continued

  Setting focus to a particular element on a screen seems like a simple and common task.  It gives the user that nice fuzzy feeling when they can just start typing in the first field of a screen without having … Continued

We’re fortunate enough to be presenting at this year’s Remix in Sydney 11th June.  We’re making an appearance in the Designer Track this year and will be showing off the new Messenger Toolkit bits.  The abstract for our talk is: … Continued

The Microsoft Mapping Road Show is back this year with sessions in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.  This year’s event is broken into both customer and partner sessions. This year’s special guest is Chris Pendleton a Virtual Earth Tech Evangelist in … Continued

DeepEarth will become an innovation centre for controls, libraries and services for use on any Silverlight mapping platform. Some Background DeepEarth began as a project for likeminded developers to explore what the power of Silverlight, DeepZoom and Maps could do. … Continued

I was asked on the MSDN VE forum if the new Silverlight control had pushpins and indeed clustered pushpins. The answer is that it doesn’t have the concept of a pushpin but rather a much more flexible method of attaching … Continued

Thursday 30 April we held our 5th Girl Geek Dinner in Brisbane.  This event was a bit different to the previous ones as we all converged upon the Microsoft office in Brisbane to have a night of Game playing. Tracy … Continued

Welcome to the monthly VE Wrap Up, did you catch what happened in March? Well April doesn’t disappoint either: Updated 3D control The 3D control was updated in April to bring higher performance and some added features. You can use … Continued

If you’re in London this Thursday you can’t miss Johannes and Simon presenting on Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008 Spatial. It sounds like an awesome event, I wish was I was there. Come along to the SQL Usergroup hosted … Continued

This is a simple list of the various resources available for your development needs. Sign up for you developer account here: https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup Official Microsoft: Virtual Earth API on MSDN Virtual Earth Interactive SDK Virtual Earth Forum on MSDN Microsoft MapPoint … Continued

Today the Virtual Earth team announced the new version of the 3D control. To install simple goto to http://maps.live.com/?mkt=en-us and click on the 3D button. Checkout New York rendering very quickly with trees and weather! I noticed a new 3D … Continued

Keith posted this awesome Silverlight3 demo showing that although the new Virtual Earth control is Silverlight2 you can happily put this in the newer framework. With this in mind I put together this little sample showing how you can use … Continued

For Girl Geek Dinner 5 in Brisbane we’re fortunate to have Tracy Whitelaw as our guest speaker who will talk about women in gaming which is very appropriate for our Girl Geek Guitar Hero night!  If you haven’t signed up … Continued

Shown at Mix last month in Chris Pendleton’s introduction to the new CTP Silverlight control this demo adds a set of simple polygons representing most of the countries of the world to the map, colouring them based on their Carbon … Continued

March was a big month for Virtual Earth, if you missed something here is the VE Wrap Up: Silverlight CTP Released The big news was the release of the Silverlight Virtual Earth control CTP. This is the next generation of … Continued

It’s only 4 weeks till out next Girl Geek Dinner! Girl Geek Guitar Hero Gaming Night This month, Microsoft have kindly lent us their office so we’re going to something a little different: a night of games! There will be … Continued

We’ve been invited back to this year’s Technology Takes You Anywhere event, held on the 6th April. Last year we wore ourselves out showing 100’s of girls how to use an XBox controller to fly around Virtual Earth and find … Continued

This morning we say goodbye to Egypt and head to Singapore on our way home.  Last night we grabbed an old newspaper from the hotel and wrapped up the vase ready for transport home.  Took a picture of it just … Continued

Our last free day in Egypt we were picked up by our awesome driver Moses and ventured out to Dashur and Saqqara to check out the less popular buy by no means less impressive pyramids. First stop was the Red … Continued

After a day back in Cairo we boarded our mini-bus for Sinai in the north-east of the country. Sinai is quite different with more rocky mountains then down south, the roads were all sealed and our driver set speed records … Continued

Located very close to Luxor is the massive ruins of Karnak. This was tourist central with a bottle of Gatorade for sale, 40 pounds ($13), in the searing heat. The main temple was impressive, the highlight being the obelix. They … Continued

A 4am start today in Luxor as I headed out to the west bank to board a hot air balloon. A dawn lift off, perfect morning with very little wind. It was my first trip in a balloon and was … Continued

This morning we dismantle our toilet and set sail for the other side of the river.  On our way to Luxor we stop at Edfu temple.  This was supposed to be a hidden gem that not a lot of tourists … Continued

After a great breakfast we say goodbye to our hosts as today we spend the whole day and night on the felucca.  I get comfy with my iPod and listen to some tunes and doze off while we sail up … Continued

We have a leisurely morning before our trip on the felucca. We wander back to the markets in search of some bread for breakfast where we find a bakery.  We’re quickly dragged inside and shown through the bakery and how … Continued

A bunch of our group are up at 3am to join the armed convoy to Abu Simbel. We get to sleep in a little as we’re getting picked up at 7:30 for our 9am flight. We arrive a the airport … Continued