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OnStar, in conjunction with the Virtual Earth team, announced the use of Microsoft Virtual Earth for its emergency response services today. OnStar, a wholly-owned subsidiary of General Motors, is a provider of in-vehicle safety, security and communication services. OnStar advisors will be able to visualize geographic- and location-based information with Virtual Earth 3D and bird’s eye imagery, which is especially helpful when a vehicle veers off the road or is in visually compromising weather conditions....

Last week during the keynote at MIX09, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president at Microsoft, announced the Virtual Earth Silverlight control, which will be made available to developers on Friday. The Virtual Earth Silverlight control will provide a smoother transition between zoom levels and when panning the maps, while significantly improving the load time required to render maps, all of which makes for a more seamless experience. For more information, please visit: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/a...p-control.aspx....

MapPoint 2009 Europe is now shipping.

New features include --

• Refreshed geographic data. Use updated geographic data sets in MapPoint to display trends and illustrate key points on maps.
• Updated user interface & improved usability. Streamlined redesign simplifies tasks and improves usability while driving. With the new integrated pan/select cursor feature, you can simply left-drag to pan and right-drag to select, which saves a huge amount of clicks and mouse travel in

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Microsoft announced the January 2009 Virtual Earth imagery release, which accounts for 37 terabytes of data. The imagery updates includes Bird’s Eye imagery for cities in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Spain, Sweden and UK. The release also updates high resolution orthos imagery in Scotland, UK, Greece, Japan, Norway, Portugal and Spain as well as satellite imagery in multiple countries. For more details on the release, visit Virtual Earth Imagery Release.

New article by Bob Beauchemin on MSDN --

"SQL Server 2008 offers a number of enhancements, including new data types, new T-SQL statements, and incremental changes to Microsoft .NET Framework support, XML support, and the Service Broker feature. By far, the biggest and most exciting change for developers is the SQL Server 2008 support for spatial data—a powerful addition to the SQL Server programmer's toolbox. In this column, I'm going to present a short overview of spatial data and...