by
Hackersoft on
19 Aug 2008, 02:13 PM
and 1,033 views
A couple of weeks ago the windows live team released the next iteration of the Windows Live Messenger Library API.
Having listened to user comments, one of the biggest requests was the ability to return user pictures so that your messenger experience could be like that of the actual Messenger client
Apparently not content with having one team blog, the Windows Live Agents team have another blog on the MSDN blog network. This new iteration starts off with a series of best practice posts for developing Live Agents and then offers up some training videos:
Quite why they need two blogs that seem to deliver similar content (unlike the consumer oriented MessengerSays blog and the Messenger developer blog) is, well, odd. But hey, just means another blog we can add to The List.
Update: From the sheer volume of posts (over 50 since I posted this!) that have gone up on this blog over night and the content of the entries it looks like they are actually migrating the blog from Live Spaces to MSDN rather than have them in parallel.
Today we look at implementing the server side clustering logic into the newly released Virtual Earth ASP.NET control. This control is perfect for server centric operations and, as you will see, works exceptionally well with the server side clustering.
Pins (VEShape.Pushpin) rendered on Virtual Earth are <div> elements with attached events. Your browser can only render so many of these quickly and before it slows down the whole experience. I tend to see this as about 200 pins, but it clearly depends upon your computer’s performance and browser of choice. Where pins overlap, although this may give an appropriate visualisation, the elements themselves become impossible to select individually. Throughout my articles I propose that you do not render overlapping pins at all. additionally you only render what is currently visible for the current map view. This simple combination will allow all elements to be selectable and typically reduces the number of pins to an acceptable level.
Visually we can style this clusters in many different ways. A cluster icon may look like a bunch of pins or it may change size and opacity to reflect the quantity it represents. This rendering of the attending MVP’s to the Microsoft summit in April shows one such example of giving accurate density of thousands of pins while only needing to render a few:
Videos, source code and more after the jump
Angus and dev.live.com
announced on the 28th July 2008 that the July refresh of the Windows Live Tools would include the
release of the much anticipated Virtual Earth ASP.NET control.
The control is a complete drag and drop experience from within Visual Studio
2008. Drag the map from your
toolbox onto your design surface and resize to suit. As you would expect all Virtual
Earth 6.1 properties can be set as properties of the control, there are a full set of server side and
client side events for the map and a range of very cool client side extenders.
Through a series of videos we take you through the full experience of installing the control and
coding with its basic features. Each video is fairly detailed and runs for about
5-7min. They are hosted by Silverlight Streaming so you will need to install the
latest Beta2 Silverlight Client or download the wmv file directly.
Through the videos I hope to not only guide you through how I saw the control
being used when I designed it but also share some tips and insights. The videos
where recorded at 1024x768px @ 30fps and rescaled for this presentation. Every
single sample shown can be downloaded as part of a single package that is also
hosted online. It is my hope this sample will grow in time to include some
complex examples. Your feedback is welcome.
Videos after the jump