Virtual Earth and AJAX Tutorial

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Steve over on MSN Spaces, one of product PMs who blogs all things Windows Live Local and Virtual Earth, has added some developer information to his stash of normally end user oriented stuff.  He wrote a great 3 part tutorial on AJAX and VE dev.  Here is his description of the three parts:

  • Part 1 – Basic mapping application built with the Virtual Earth Control. Pan and zoom with the onscreen compass, Mouse wheel, Drag box, or keyboard. Each time the map moves, we draw a marker icon dead center of the visible map area. In part two, it is the coordinate of this marker we’ll be passing to the server.
  • Part 2 – We add a link in the page that fires off an asynchronous call to a server component. We pass the current Latitude/Longitude in this call. We’ll stub out the server piece in this part, implementing the reverse Geocode in part three. My Server component is an ASPX page written in C# – you can implement the functionality with whatever server programming or scripting language you prefer. The Server page will spit out javascript as its response, to be executed in the client. And finally to complete the round-trip, we’ll implement the callback in the client that takes the returned Javascript and executes it with the eval() menthod.
  • Part 3 – We’ll Flesh out the Server component to make a SOAP call to the MapPoint Web Service (MWS) to reverse geocode the coordinate passed in from the client. You could choose to do whatever you like here – perhaps grabbing traffic from MWS, Business listings from Windows Live Local, Photos from Flickr, whatever you want…