In our third episode of Behind The Maps we go to Boulder Colorado, home to a large number of the scientists and engineers who create Virtual Earth. In this episode we meet David Simons and Tom Barclay who created the Processing Framework that manages all of our data and image processing pipelines. Some of you may recognize one of the people in this video. If you don't you'll probably recongize one of his creations that was a precursor of and laid the foundation for Virtual Earth today. I hope you

ESRI, a Global ISV partner, is pushing the envelope on technology adoption and environmental issues. In this interview, I talk with Senior Product Managers Rob Elkins and John Baleja about technology advancements, development needs and what the Microsoft partnership means to ESRI. Through personal experiences, customer examples and a unique environmental perspective, Rob and John give us a look into the world of geospatial analysis and the importance of Microsoft technologies in their customer’s

In this second episode of Behind The Maps we go to Philadelphia to see the UltraCam in action. One of our partners, Keystone Aerial Surveys , shows us the next step in the process where the UltraCam is used to capture imagery for Virtual Earth . This is a little bit of a long episode because there are three interviews in one video, but really fun to watch and TONS of great information on the next step in our journey on how we bring Virtual Earth to life.

Finally at long last we have released the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control (CTP Release). I spent a few minutes with Angus Logan from the Windows Live Platform Team to show off the control and give a quick demo to get you started. Go get the control from http://dev.live.com/tools , download the Windows Live Tools July CTP Release then watch the video and go build some maps. -Enjoy.

Marc Schweigert shows you how to draw a polygon on a Virtual Earth map and save it using ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), LINQ to SQL, and the new geography data type in SQL Server 2008. To download the source code visit: http://blogs.msdn.com/devkeydet/archive/2008/07/18/screencast-saving-virtual-earth-polygons-to-sql-server-2008.aspx

Marc Schweigert builds off of the concepts shown in his previous screencast and shows you how to render a polygon on a Virtual Earth map using REST, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), LINQ to SQL, and the new geography data type in SQL Server 2008. To learn more about the GeoRSS utility library, visit: http://blogs.msdn.com/eugeniop/archive/2008/07/01/simple-georss-utility-library-released.aspx A big thanks to Eugenio Pace for letting me use it as part of my sample! To download the source code

Welcome to the inaugural episode of a new video series called, "Behind The Maps". In this series we'll explore all of the technology that makes up Virtual Earth and meet the scientists and engineers who bring Virtual Earth to life. In this episode we go to Graz, Austria and meet Michael Gruber who invented the UltraCam aerial camera and Bernhard Reitinger who created our UltraMap software. We'll spend some time getting the details on this camera and software and get an up close look at both.

VIEWS (the Virtual Earth Wrapper for Silverlight) provides a fully managed wrapper around Virtual Earth for Silverlight applications. VIEWS has its roots in Microsoft Research but now lives as an open source project on CodePlex . Join us for a quick lap around VIEWS and learn how you can add mapping to your applications without getting deep into JavaScript.

Marc Schweigert shows you how to use Virtual Earth in a WPF application by using a prototype WPF Virtual Earth control. You'll also see a walkthrough of how the prototype control was built. You can download the prototype and sample application at http://blogs.msdn.com/devkeydet/archive/2008/06/24/wpf-and-virtual-earth-revisited.aspx .

This Week on Channel 9, Brian and Dan cover: Updates to Live Mesh Improve Desktop Search performance by downloading Windows Search 4.0 Lots of updates to Popfly Game Creator from Adam Nathan The IE team sends Mozilla a congratulations cake (via Ars Technica) Update your Silverlight.js file for Firefox 3 (via Tim Heuer) DeepEarth: Virtual Earth + Deep Zoom (via Jamie Thomson) Ariel Stallings from Microspotting designs cool I am the empire t-shirts Video clip of Richard Sprague demoing Response Point