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.

In Singapore’s Microsoft Innovation Centre, we have been innovating on Virtual Earth. In this quick chat, I caught up with Alvin Poh, to find out what innovation he has been working on. Dubbed “Schools Near Me”, the application allows us to use a Postal Code, retrieve a set of GPS coordinates and pulls a map from Virtual Earth and overlay data onto the map to provide meaningful services and information. As the name suggests, this applications allows us to find all the schools around where I stay