Daily Archives: July 29, 2006

Two Massachussetts User [INETA] Group Talks next week

Presentations

I’ll be presenting at two user groups in Massachussets next week. I will be giving the same presentation at both groups: “Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers”.

Description: Asynchronous programming makes so much sense for web applications but is often tough to achieve. With .NET 2.0, there are a number of new methods to simplify asynchronous development. These can be found in web pages, in ADO.NET, in Web Services and other ASP.NET 2.0 functionality. This session will examine these various ways to leverage asynchronous programming in your web development and make suggestions for which methods are appropriate for particular scenarios.

The talk will be straight ASP.NET 2.0 features, so it will not be abou AJAX or ATLAS, though I will include their baby cousin, ClientSideCallBacks.

Tuesday Aug 1: Western Mass .NET User Group in Easthampton, MA

Wedneday Aug 2: New England VB Pro User Group at the Micrsoft Offices in Waltham, MA

Thanks to INETA, once again!

Hey, Virtual Earth is finally aimed at Developers!

Virtual Earth

If it weren’t for Neil Roodyn’s ViaVirtualEarth site, anyone doing development against Virtual Earth would have been at a huge loss last summer. Eventually Microsoft started doing some webcasts, but still, there was a dearth of help out there directly from Microsoft. I just got a download notification from Microsoft and it points to the Virtual Earth SDK.

Personally, I have stopped fiddling with VE since the API was overhauled a while ago. I know I have a learning curve (and my Virtual Earth on Ink app… using the old API broke with the release of the new – uggh) but am busy with so many other things. One of the things I had done in my app was discover and reuse the tiles from whatever map was in current view. Apparently you are not allowed to do that now [no comment], though there are some interesting articles (1, 2) on ViaVirtualEarth about using the VE Tile Servers (with caveats about the future availability of the tile servers).

I would love to see the local.live.com use ink. However my app has been out there for over a year and I haven’t heard a peep from Microsoft about it. Oh well, it was still a really fun challenge that Neil put in front of me. 🙂

In the meantime, Virtual Earth on local.live.com has become an amazing tool! I’m a big fan of it, but now define myself as end-user rather than as a developer of VE.

Here’s the SDK.