I wrote about the 6.2 release of Virtual Earth on September 10th, saying that it was due to be released on September 22nd. Well, it’s now the 24th and we still haven’t seen the new code. There are signs, however, that it’s on the way, including a document on MSDN (you can get to it by going to the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK -- http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/ -- and clicking on the “What’s new in the latest release” link).

The document has more information on the coming release, including the following, copied and pasted from the document (and yes, those links to MSDN do currently work):

• Pushpin clustering. Use the VEShapeLayer.SetClusteringConfiguration Method to set how to display and cluster overlapping pushpins for better shape display at higher altitudes.
• Hints for route instructions. Help your users find route turns with hints about nearby landmarks and intersections using the VERouteItineraryItem.Hints Property.
• Imagery metadata. Retrieve information about imagery using the VEMap.GetImageryMetadata Method.
• Base map disabling. Use the Virtual Earth Mercator projection in non-mapping applications by turning off the base map with the VEMapOptions.LoadBaseTiles Property. You can use the VEMap.HideScalebar Method as well.
• Support for other languages. Retrieve maps with labels in French, German, Italian, and Spanish from Virtual Earth. See the Returning Localized Results topic for a list of supported culture strings.
• 3D model import. Import 3D model data files into a shape layer using the VEMap.Import3DModel Method. Interact with these models as you would any shape.
• Updated interactive SDK. See the new functionality of the Virtual Earth map control demonstrated in the updated Virtual Earth Interactive SDK.

I also received an email from Microsoft yesterday that said that the release has been delayed and that they will send out an update on the status sometime today. I’ll make sure that this post gets updated when I receive the email.

UPDATE: The new release is now out (9/25/2008 at 7:45 AM Mountain Time).

Just received an early announcement from Microsoft that the next version of the Virtual Earth map control, 6.2, will be released - along with version 1.0 of the Virtual Earth Web Services - on September 22nd. There are some pretty exciting enhancements coming with the new map control, including:

• Static maps
• Direct map tile access
• Aerial map imagery metadata
• Pushpin clustering
• Landmark-based directions
• Improved geocoding
• Expanded rooftop geocoding in the US
• Real-time weather integration in 3D

In addition to these enhancements/new features, Microsoft is touting "expanded mobile support" and "expanded international features".

I'm most excited about the tile access, imagery metadata, and pushpin clustering. I'm also very interested in learning more about the Virtual Earth Web Services. My Virtual Earth users should be very happy after this release...

Yesterday, a bit more than three weeks after our initial public release, we released a new version of whereyougonnabe. In case you missed my earlier posts about whereyougonnabe, I'll briefly describe the system and what it strives to do:

whereyougonnabe is a web application (it is currently tied to Facebook, but in the near future we're going to take it outside of the Facebook environment, including a soon-to-be-released mobile-friendly version and integration with other social networking communities) that helps you meet your friends more often. Of course, that's just the tag line, so I'll go a bit deeper. Basically you tell our system where/when you are going to be in the future and we then analyze your "activity", compare it to the "activities" of your friends, and notify you of possible serendipitous moments. whereyougonnabe differentiates between local and global activities, allowing us to filter out some "interactions" while notifying you of "interactions" that we think you'll find of interest. And, on top of this, we use a granular spatial model to help us identify "interactions" - something that none of our competitors do very well. These things combined allow whereyougonnabe to do some really cool things.

With our initial release, we worked on building a solid foundation to support our core application. It took us about six months to get things to the point where we felt confident about releasing to the public (with a 1.0.0 release). Well, here we are three weeks later and we just released a new version (1.1.0). With this release, we are *finally getting to the point where we can start adding on some cool features (outside of the "core" functionality) that we think will make whereyougonnabe even more useful. Of course, in addition to adding new features, we've also enhanced some of the existing features and taken care of quite a few bugs. You can get the full details about this new release at whereyougonnabe's blog, but I'll list the highlights here:

• Full support for Safari - this was requested by quite a few of our users, so if you were holding back because you use Safari exclusively, you can now check whereyougonnabe out. We now support both Safari for Mac and Safari for Windows.
• Email notifications for new interactions - what good are new "interactions" that occur between you and your friends if you don't know about them? Well, we're taking care of this for you by sending a daily archive of any new interactions to you. Of course, if you don't have any new interactions we won't send you an email and you can always opt out of this service. We do, however, encourage you to stay subscribed, as we think that this feature will truly help you meet your friends more often.
• Better Facebook integration - we are now taking advantage of some of the integration points that Facebook gives us access to, including a new profile widget. If you're currently a user, the widget should show up on your profile the next time you use whereyougonnabe. If you're not yet a user, the widget will show up on your profile when you add our application and use it for the first time. We are also working on more integration points, including using Facebook's mini-feed and status features. Look for these features to be pushed out to whereyougonnabe in the very near future (likely by the end of this week).
• Usability improvements - we've improved whereyougonnabe's saved locations feature that allows you to re-use previously created activities. We now do a full-text search on your previously created activities, making it easier to create an activity within our system.
• General bug fixes - we've taken care of quite a few bugs, and improved our session handling in general - which we expect will make the system more stable. Some of these fixes will be more evident than others, but all of them should improve the overall experience of using whereyougonnabe.

There's lots more coming. We're currently focused on making it easier for whereyougonnabe's users to create activities, and should have some news on calendar integration (iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook) soon.

Here are some screenshots of the features discussed above:

Johannes Kebeck has an interesting post showing how to get the benefits of the MapPoint Web Service method, FindNearRoute, through the use of SQL Server 2008. He uses a newly-added feature of the Virtual Earth API that allows developers to gain access to a complete returned route-geometry when performing a route. This new feature, however, does require that the mapping application use customer identification (which, in turn, requires that you sign up for a Virtual Earth platform developer account).

If you haven't checked out Johannes' blog lately, you might want to give it a go now. He has written a whole slew of Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008 posts lately, and there's a wealth of good information there.

We've already started using SQL Server 2008 in some of our development applications, and are planning on taking advantage of ArcSDE 9.3's ability to utilize SQL Server 2008's spatial data types. We're hoping that by doing this, we'll be able to offer access to our geometries through both traditional GIS tools (ArcGIS Desktop for our shop) and web services (ADO.Net Data Services returning JSON and XML and other services built on top of WCF). As we're already using ArcGIS Server 9.3's REST capabilities from within our JavaScript/Virtual Earth applications, if we can "close the circle" by tying SQL Server 2008 and Virtual Earth together in a robust and meaningful way, we may just be able to hit the proverbial bulls-eye. We've already written quite a bit of code that brings these technologies together, but are still deciding on the best overall approach.

One thing that is still unclear to me is if we're going to utilize ESRI's tools heavily or try to avoid them as much as possible and stick with all of the non-ESRI .NET technologies. In a lot of ways, we're already going the latter route (saying ArcGIS Server 9.2 still leaves a bad taste in my mouth), but I've been impressed with ArcGIS Server 9.3 so far, so I'm withholding judgement until we see how the new set of technologies perform in a couple of months.

And from the Microsoft camp, I expect that more direct integration with SQL Server 2008 will be coming soon to the Virtual Earth API. I haven't, however, heard of any solid dates yet. Any integration will be much-welcomed, as it will save us precious development time.

Whichever route we decide to take, it's pretty obvious that now is a great time to be working in web mapping. Especially if you're able to take advantage of all the integration points available through .NET.

Firebug is a web developer's best friend. Without it, there are times when we'd be absolutely lost. Luckily it is actively developed and well-supported.

The 1.1 beta version was released in the middle of February, but I'm just getting around to upgrading to it. Until I started to actively use Firefox 3, I didn't see much of a need to upgrade (Firebug 1.1 can be installed on Firefox 3), but boy was I wrong. There are a couple of big additions that make this a must-have upgrade for me:

• eval() debugging - this is the big one. I can't tell you how many times I've run into cryptic issues using the eval() statement. Firebug 1.1 handles this by displaying code sent to eval() in the Script panel as a new source file. This code can then be debugged just like any other JavaScript in Firebug. If you don't want to debug eval() code, you can always turn this option off. You'll get better performance with it turned off.
• Aptana IDE editor integration - I use Aptana's Eclipse plugin for all of my CSS, HTML, and JavaScript coding, and integration between Aptana and Firebug only makes my life that much easier.
• Cache tab for Net panel - this should make it easy to verify if a resource is cached or not.
• Supports Firefox 3 - already mentioned this one above, but thought it should be mentioned again.

Big news coming out from Microsoft this past Monday: They released an early version of their Live Mesh platform to a limited group of testers. Live Mesh is basically a system that connects a user's disparate systems (Windows machines, Mac machines, and mobile devices) together, making it extremely easy to share resources between them.

The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations).

It looks like Live Mesh is building on the FolderShare idea and implementation. I'm excited to see what comes out of it.

Here's a link to a series of videos that puts it all together: https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/LearnMore.aspx.

I've been meaning to play around with Microsoft's new ADO.NET Data Service stuff (formerly known as "Astoria") for some time now, but couldn't find the time until today. When I last blogged about it, the technology was still in a Community Technology Preview. Since then, however, it has matured, is now packaged with the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP, and will undoubtedly be included in a future service pack or release of the .Net Framework. Until then, though, you have to walk a difficult road to get it installed and working as, like a lot of Microsoft's "unofficial/unsupported side projects", it isn't just a single install to get it up and running. It's, rather, a series of installs followed by obscure IIS configuration changes followed by pulling your hair out followed by (finally) some ADO.Net bliss.

Here are the steps to get your development machine setup to work on ADO.Net Data Services. These instructions apply to a 64-bit Windows XP SP2 installation. The steps may vary for other versions of Windows, but I'm pretty sure that most of them will apply in most cases.

• First of all, Visual Studio 2008 is a prerequisite for developing ADO.Net Data Services. You can use any version, including Visual Web Developer Express.
• Next you need to download and install the ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP. If you're on a 64-bit operating system, you may have to manually copy the System.Data.Entity and System.Data.Entity.Design .dlls from your GAC to your .Net v3.5 directory (I had to). A bit more detail:
  • For some reason, these two dlls don't seem to install correctly when you run the ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP installer. To solve this:
    • Click "Start>Run" and then paste the paths below into the "Open:" dialog and hit enter:
      • C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Data.Entity\3.5.0.0__b77a5c561934e089
      • C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Data.Entity.Design\3.5.0.0__b77a5c561934e089
    • From each of the now open directories, drag and drop the single .dll into the following directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5.
• Next you need to download and install the XML Editor QFE and the ADO.Net Entity Framework Tools Dec 07 CTP, in order.
• And now you should be ready to develop ADO.Net Data Services! There's a great walkthrough available on the ASP.Net 3.5 "Quick Starts" site.

After you've created your data service on your local dev machine, you're probably going to want to deploy it to a dev server, right? Well, I did. And, of course, I ran into another issue that required quite a bit of Googling and cursing to solve. After deploying the application and pointing a Virtual Directory at it, I received the following error message when browsing to the .svc in Internet Explorer:

"A name was started with an invalid character. Error processing resource"

Well, what is this? I found lots of others asking that very same question, and finally stumbled onto a solution in the MSDN forums. I'll outline the steps here, as much for my own sanity if I run into this problem again on another server as to help others. These steps apply for IIS 6. If you're on IIS 7, here's a quick tip: make sure that you make the directory an application and not just a Virtual Directory...

• First of all, make sure that you have the ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP installed on the server. This should be obvious, I know, but it wouldn't be the first time...
• Next, you'll need to manually add a script mapping for the .svc extension to your application's properties in IIS Manager:
  • Open IIS Manager.
  • Right-click on your application and choose "Properties".
  • On the "Virtual Directory" tab, click on the "Configuration..." button.
  • On the "Mappings" tab, make sure that .svc isn't already present in the "Application extensions" section. If it isn't, click on the "Add..." button.
  • Click on the "Browse..." button and browse to and select C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll.
  • Back on the "Add/Edit Application Extension Mapping" dialog, type ".svc" in the "Extension:" textbox and click "OK".
  • Click "OK" two more times to get out of the application properties.

Theoretically none of this should be necessary, as IIS's script mappings are supposed to be updated whenever a new version of the .Net Framework is installed on the machine. However, I found that this didn't happen in my case (I was, again, doing this on 64-bit machine (Windows Server 2003), so maybe it is another funky 64-bit thing). I also found that running ServiceModelReg.exe, which is supposed to WCF-enable IIS, didn't work either.

So after you do all of this (and I honestly hope that you had a much easier time than I did) you're good to go.

I'll post about my actual development experience with ADO.Net Data Services in a separate post. But I'll put in this teaser: You can do some really cool stuff with these extensions!

If you haven't heard of Adobe AIR yet, you will soon. It is a runtime that allows developers to deploy web applications to the desktop, cross platform (well, I say that, but Air is currently only supported on Windows and Mac OS X, but Adobe says that the "Linux release of Adobe Air is under development" and will be released to "public alpha on our [Adobe's] Labs website in early 2008 in order to collect feedback from Linux developers").

After a fairly long incubation period in Adobe Labs, AIR 1.0 was released today. That said, AIR is already somewhat proven, as developers have been working with it for quite some time now and several large companies are already taking advantage of the technology.

What are the benefits of Adobe AIR? Well, other than the obvious (write once for the web and desktop, utilize your web development skills, etc.), AIR provides a number of benefits that you only get with a traditional desktop application, including:

• the ability for an application to run in the background.
• the ability to run while disconnected from the internet.
• full desktop integration, including access to the clipboard and system tray.
• access to a local database.
• increased application response time.

If you don't buy into the hype, I understand, but I encourage you to at least check it out. Here are some good links to check out:

• Dav Glass has packaged a sample AIR application built on the latest YUI release.
• Jack Slocum, author of my favorite JavaScript library, Ext, recently converted the Simple Tasks sample application to run on AIR 1.0.

And in closing, if you want to work with Adobe AIR (or you do a lot of front-end development with JavaScript), you should check out the outstanding Aptana IDE. It is the best IDE for doing AJAX development that I've found, and has support for Adobe AIR development. I discovered it several months ago while looking for a Ruby on Rails IDE, and haven't looked back since.

I expect that I'll be playing with AIR sometime soon, although most of the development that I'm currently doing (web map development) doesn't really fit into AIR. If I do play around, I'll post here.

If you read Peter Batty's early-October announcement about the formation of Spatial Networking, Inc., you may already know that I've been working with him on the development of a spatially-focused application built on the Facebook platform. The project has been super-fun to work on, and, after four months of development on it, we're finally getting to a release-worthy product.

Well, today Peter announced (and so now I can announce, as well) that he's going to be giving the first public demo of our application at the Boulder-Denver New Technology Meetup Group next week.

I can't really go into any detail about what the app does, but I will say that I think we're breaking new ground in the social networking space. If you have any experience with GIS at all, you know the value that can be added to just about any product or service through the integration of spatial data. Well, our application has the same kind of "value add".

We're currently moving towards a very-limited alpha release later this week and then expect to conduct a limited beta test within February. If all things go reasonably well with these releases, we could go live with a public release soon after.

I'll post more as I'm allowed...

I've recently been tasked with setting up a Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007 portal for multiple program areas within the organization that I work for. I've worked with Sharepoint in the past, but have never really had the opportunity to "dive deep" into the technology, so I'm not all that familiar with the inner-workings.

That said, I didn't expect it to be too difficult to setup a single template subsite and then clone the template to create multiple sites with the same look, feel, and functionality. Well, I was wrong. You see, if you don't have access to the server that you're developing for (and I don't), you have to either work with the server admin to get the template put into the server's template collection or use a workaround that I discovered after a bit of playing around in Sharepoint Designer 2007:

1. Develop a Sharepoint, getting it to the point where you'd like to "clone" it.

2. Use Sharepoint Designer 2007 (I'm sure you can do this with other tools as well, but I haven't verified this) to backup the "template" Sharepoint site.

a. After opening the site in Sharepoint Designer 2007, go to the "Site">"Administration">"Backup Web Site..." tool.

b. Click "OK" on the next dialog, choose where you want to save the .cmp (Content Migration Package) and press "Save" in the next dialog, and then wait for the backup to complete.

3. Next go back to the parent site that you want to create the subsite off of and create the new subsite. There are multiple ways to do this. I just use the "Folder List" dialog, right-click on the parent node, and select "New">"Subsite..." option. In the "New" dialog, just choose to create the subsite based on the "Blank Site" template.

4. After the subsite is created successfully, Sharepoint Designer 2007 should open it in a new window. Next you simply need to restore the backup that you previously took to this new subsite.

a. To do this, go to the "Site">"Administration">"Restore Web Site..." tool.

b. In the explorer dialog, browse to the backup that you created previously and open it. Click "OK" in the "Restore Web Site" dialog and wait for the restore to finish.

And that's it! This solution is definitely a bit of a workaround, but it works well if you don't have access to the template library. If anyone knows of a better way to do this, I'd be interested to hear about it.