Deep Earth Released Into the Wild
The open source project dubbed Deep Earth has been officially released. The project puts Microsoft Virtual Earth in a Silverlight UX allowing for incredible visual and scalable geospatial data visualization.
DeepEarth is a mapping control powered by the combination of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 platform and the DeepZoom (MuliScaleImage) control. At its core, it builds on these innovative technologies to provide an architecture for bringing together layers for services, data providers, and your own custom mapping elements together into an impressive user experience. Also featured are in depth examples of how you can leverage Virtual Earth Web Services to take advantage of advanced GIS service functionality. This is what you need to get an interactive, native Silverlight 2.0, map into your application today.
You can see a working version of the application on the Deep Earth Soul Solutions web site.
Here are some of the features:
- Fully implemented map control with property and event model
- Fully templated set of map navigation controls
- Layers for inclusion of Points, LineStrings and Polygons (OGS)
- Conversion library for Geography to Screen coordinated systems.
- Geocoding (find an address)
- Reverse Geocoding (getting an address from a point on the map)
- Routing (Directions)
- Marque zoom selection (default Ctrl-click and drag or from menu toggle)
- Map rotation
Source- MSDN Blog
Silverlight Toolkit - December Release
The Silverlight Toolkit is a project built by the Silverlight product team, which contains a lot of "out-of-release cycle" controls.
These are grouped into three parts:
- Controls
- Charts
- Themes
Controls include various nice controls (lots of them already part of WPF):
- Auto Complete Textbox
- DockPanel
- Expander
- Label
- NumericUpDown
- TreeView
- Viewbox
- WrapPanel
These controls are especially useful if you plan to write business applications. Also they have similar controls in WPF, so if you plan to port your apps from Silverlight to WPF they come in handy as well.
Download them from http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/.
Source- MSDN Blog
Windows 7 Beta 1 for MDC Attendees!
Breaking news!!!
Attend an upcoming MSDN Developer Conference and you will receive a Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD.
Note: The Windows 7 DVDs will not be ready to hand out in time for the events happening in December, but we’ll definitely mail them out to you as soon as they become available. Everyone attending the event from Houston, Orlando and Atlanta WILL get their DVD, just not at the actual event 
Register today and you’ll get the best of the PDC in your own backyard and hear all of the exciting announcements around the Azure Services Platform and Windows 7.
- Experience Windows Azure
Create applications that seamlessly bridge the gaps between PC, Web, and phone - Be among the first to see Windows 7
See the latest advances in Multi-Touch Application Development - Take your .NET skills to the next level
See sessions on WPF 4.0, Silverlight 2, The Future of C# and VB, ASP.NET 4.0, Live Mesh and more
The Cost? Just $99.
And, did we mention that attendees will get some cool giveaways?
Check out the session line up…
Azure Services Platform
Client and Presentation
Tools, Languages and Framework
A Lap Around Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform
Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) Roadmap
The Future of Managed Languages: F#, C#, and Visual Basic
Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Service
Developing Data-centric Applications Using the WPF DataGrid and Ribbon Controls
A Lap Around "Oslo"
A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
Building Business Focused Applications using Silverlight 2
A Lap Around Visual Studio 2010
Developing Applications Using Microsoft SQL Data Services
ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap
Parallel Programming for Managed Code Developers
Register for a city near you…
Date City
- 12/9/08-Houston, TX
- 12/11/08-Orlando, FL
- 12/16/08-Atlanta, GA
- 1/13/09-Chicago, IL
- 1/13/09-Minneapolis, MN
- 1/16/09-Washington, DC
- 1/20/09-New York, NY
- 1/22/09-Boston, MA
- 1/22/09-Detroit, MI
- 1/26/09-Dallas, TX
- 2/19/90-San Francisco, CA
Cool Giveaways
The MSDN Developer Conference will not only WOW you with the coolest sessions from the PDC but you will also be in the running to win one of 3 Lego NXT Robotics Kits and the WROX Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio book. Other giveaways include a Gamer Backpack filled with the latest XBox games and a Mobility Backpack full of cool hardware.
Source- MSDN Blog
Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Release Candidate)
The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft’s entire Web Platform, including IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform.
New Updates! Now supporting Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Web PI makes it easy to install and stay up-to-date with the Microsoft Web Platform. This updated release lets you install ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight, and much more!
Microsoft starts to talk about Silverlight 3; coming in 2009
Less than a year after sending out Beta 1, Microsoft released the final version of Silverlight 2 in October. According to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines in the past four weeks. What’s next you ask? Silverlight 3 of course. Guthrie’s latest blog post underlines how Silverlight 2 is being implemented by various companies across the web, but more interestingly, it also sheds some light on what’s planned for the next release:
"Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements—we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. Next year Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express will also support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight, and add tool support for data-binding."
Source: One Microsoft Way
Windows Server 2008 IIS7 Media Packs
IIS Media Pack 1.0 provides media-specific extensions that make delivering media from IIS simple, and cost-effective. Building on the security, reliability and manageability of IIS 7.0, IIS Media Pack protects media assets as it increases scalability by supporting more concurrent users per server. IIS supports all media file types, including WMV, FLV, and MP4, and provides a great way to use your existing Web infrastructure to deliver compelling rich media content to clients such as Microsoft Silverlight.
With IIS 7.0 and IIS Media Pack 1.0, you can:
- Save bandwidth costs by throttling the speed at which content is downloaded
- Decrease network traffic by metering your media deliveries
- Monetize media assets with Web playlists that personalize content and prevent ad skipping
- Intelligently deliver multiple media formats from a single server, including .wmv, .flv, and .mp4 files
Get the 64bit pack @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=93d59f79-9555-473d-a07a-e21020d1fc25&DisplayLang=en.
Get the 32bit pack @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2cf81f25-1692-41f7-b916-db5c7e44e6ea&DisplayLang=en.
Source- Technet Blog
25GB of Free Online Storage with Windows Live SkyDrive
The Windows Live SkyDrive Team has posted a in-depth post offering a overview of what’s coming with their next update. First and foremost: Windows Live SkyDrive will be boosting everyone’s storage from 5GB to 25GB. Secondly, they want to give you more control over your files by offering you new features to do so:
Download photos directed to your to Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Download as a .zip file. Download an entire folder in one compressed file (initially available only in the United States, Denmark, and Ireland).
Move files between folders.
Copy files to multiple folders.
Sharing photos is huge these days. They’ve added almost 20 new features to make the photo experience on Windows Live SkyDrive even better such as supporting People Tags, bigger thumbnails, and a new online slideshow using Microsoft Silverlight.
You will be able to also keep your Internet Explorer favorites synced up with multiple PCs using Windows Live SkyDrive and Windows Live SkyDrive.
There is a lot coming to Windows Live SkyDrive! Check out their blog post for more details on what’s coming up.
Source- Windows Experience Blog
Windows 7 surprise: DivX built in
One of the new features announced at the recent Windows 7 Reviewer’s Workshop in LA is that Windows 7 will natively support a number of popular media formats, so that users don’t have to worry about finding, installing and downloading third-party codecs.
This is an evolution in media support which is similar to the inclusion of native MPEG-2 playback in Windows Vista, providing the DVD playback functionality which was missing in Windows XP.
It’s an interesting change by Microsoft, which, in the past, has doggedly clung to the hope that Windows Media Video will end up as the prevailing video format for the internet. It appears to have finally conceded that the vast majority of people are watching downloaded stuff in DivX or Xvid — possibly a realisation driven by the enormous amount of telemetry data it has collected from users of Vista that it never had access to through XP. It has stopped short of bundling Adobe Flash support into Windows, though, as it develops its own Silverlight technology.
Source- APC
