Samiq Bits: 10/01/2006

Sunday, October 01, 2006

How-to: Virtual Earth & Atlas

During the last weeks I've got meself into working in a mashup application for a friend of mine, essentially is a Real State website that will enable my friends to post the properties they have up for sell and rent, as well as to be the first point of contact for the company.

Part of this work I've done is to choose a mapping techonology to be used throught the application, as of now I've gone thru Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth. I currently live in Costa Rica and as u might suppose we don't have that much of support as the guys @ the US, UK and other big cities around the world in terms of address match and mapping options, other than satellite imaginary; which in terms of usability I need a service that provides the best support in terms of me contry and those where my friends offer their services, which right now are Nicaragua, Panamá and Chile.

I pretty much have tried all three though in terms of setting up the mash up there is one that offers better support for techonologies like ASP.NET and that is, of course, Virtual Earth. Eventhough in terms of API all three expose pretty much the same functionality I found this screencast posted by the guys @ Federal Dev Blog, where they show in 20min how to come out with a really complete and clean Virtual Earth mashup for a website using the AtlasVE control and a couple of methods exposed thru webservices.

If u find urself in a similar situation as I am, where u need to come up with a quite fast and easy to mantain mapping mash up, go ahead and take a look at this boundle work put togheter by this guys.

Will be nice, though, to have the Atlas or Toolkit's teams to come up with a similar control both for Yahoo! and Google maps proposals, I know it won't be that hard once they have finish up the VE one.

Update: For those guys out there who thinks VE is not their right choise the same guys that put togheter the screencast on VE and Atlas, have a Part I to the same proposal using 100% Ajax techniques using jscript and plain html, which in terms of porting to any other API is quite easy.

Update: Just crowling the internet for something more I found this step by step tutorial by Jonathan Hawks, out from msdn blogs, for those who want just to copy paste whatever is in the videos.

Finally, Applications = Code + Markup

A bit more of a month has gone since I ordered but, I finally got the Applications = Code + Markup Book from Amazon this week. I've been looking forward to this book for a few months now and as it's been in me hands for a couple days now, I've gone thru some of its initial chapters already.

I have to say I really like the way Charles have got it written, it is quite friendly to read and with it exposes some fancy mathematical functions that gets u right to the basic background u should have behind the new concepts MSFT have put together for this new framework.

For now this is it, though I will be posting some more as I go thru it in more depth, so far it's an excellent starting point for WPF and some of the Vista way of doing things, for the time been I've gathered a couple of links and blogs that I've found useful around this matters, enjoy: