How to start with Virtual Earth

  • Article

My independent software vendors (ISV's) are looking for ways to differentiate their products from their competitors. One way is to provide maps and location information.

The Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services that combines unique bird’s eye, aerial, and 3-D imagery with best-of-breed mapping, location and search functionality. With ongoing investments in innovation that are driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform 5.0 continues to offer new tools, advanced feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities.

Once you incorporate Virtual Earth into your applicaiton, your users will be able to use their own data to build routes, improve finding each locations, or complex data analysis based on location.

You can start by checking out the Virtual Earth developer site. You'll find links to blogs there that describe all the aspects of developing on Virtual Earth.

You can also find articles, an application gallery to show how others have used it in their application, and the terms of use that your business side of the house will want to know and understand.

There's a new interactive Virtual Earth software developer kit (SDK) 5.0 that you can download and try out. The kits shows how to use the following new features:

  • Pushpins, polylines, and polygons
  • GeoRSS Imports
  • Shape Layers
  • Find Methods
  • Tile Layers