Friday, February 29, 2008

Google Maps vs Microsoft Virtual Earth

For those people who don't want to read and just wanna play, here's the demosite: http://www.wijzijnhier.nl/Showcase/Maps_vs_LiveEarth/

After working with Google Maps and wanting to review Microsoft Virtual Earth I thought I'd have a look and see what the differences and similarities are. I also noticed that not everybody knows of the existence of Microsoft Virtual Earth (VE). Nice opportunity to change that as well :)

Virtual Earth is an application like Google Maps and has almost the same abilities. There are a few minor differences (for as far as I noticed creating the demo application).

One of the differences is the appearance of the controls. It's a matter of taste, but imho VE looks better than Maps.



image 1: Google Maps 


image 2: Microsoft Virtual Earth



Diving in a bit deeper, into the code, its the about the same story. Implementation is comparable. Only a few different implementations of events and stuff like that. No problems or difficulties with either one while creating the demo app.
One major difference I notices was the extra view option "Bird's eye". This is a sort of an aerial photo but from an angle which gives a better experience than the aerial one:
 



image 3: Bird's eye view

In my opinion both of these map tools are comparable and quite easy to use. My preference for a map tool is Virtual Earth because of the Bird's eye view and the nicer controls.

Microsoft is also working on MapCruncher for Microsoft Virtual Earth. This tool can be used to importing, layering and sharing maps using the Virtual Earth platform. Maybe I'll check that out later on.

If you want to tryout Google Maps and Live Earth for yourself, I made a webpage that holds both of the controls.
You can find it here:
http://www.wijzijnhier.nl/Showcase/Maps_vs_LiveEarth/

More info:
http://maps.google.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/default.aspx

Scott Guthrie releases more info on Silverlight 2.0

He now focusses on Expression Blend and how this works with Silverlight 2.0. Again a great set of tutorials.

Can't wait to get started!

Click here to check it out

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Tweening library for Silverlight

Check out MC's Sandpit for a great tween library for Silverlight based on the actionscript library Tweener.

TweenerDooby

The article contains by some nice samples and explanation. The project is shared on Codeplex, source code available for download.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Silverlight Pong

A while back I created a Silverlight 2.0 (1.1) alpha Pong game, for the excercise.

pong

You can view it here: http://www.wijzijnhier.nl/Showcase/Silverlight/Pong/Testpage.html

and download it here: http://www.wijzijnhier.nl/Showcase/Silverlight/Pong/pong.zip

Have fun!

Sunday, February 24, 2008

First look(s) at Silverlight 2.0

Scott Guthrie has published an article with a 8! tutorials of a Digg client application in SL2.0: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx

Koen of First Floor Software wrote an article about the control hierarchy in SL 2.0. (take a look at the saved screenshot of the toolbox in VS): http://www.firstfloorsoftware.com/BlogPost.aspx?id=12127

Spinawards Flash and Silverlight site

Last week we sent in our entry for the Spinawards (Dutch web award).
We created a Flash site and a Silverlight site to show our entries to the jury and to our customers and to you :).

Check it our over here:
(Flash version) http://spinawards.amercom.nl/
(Silverlight version) http://spinawards.amercom.nl/silverlight

Soon I'll publish more silverlight content so stay tuned.