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Virtual Earth for Government blog readers are by now well familiar with Microsoft partner IDV Solutions and its Visual Fusion Suite offering that allows customers to build visual composite applications that integrate customer data with the Virtual Earth mapping platform. And since you are, you also know how slick these applications have always been. An early Virtual Earth "integrator" (if I may say use that word), IDV has in many ways set the bar early on for intuitive and visually appealing user interfaces for business intelligence mapping applications. In the past, this was often accomplished using FLASH technology but recently IDV unveiled a mapviewer demo that utilizes Microsoft Silverlight technology. Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug-in that provides support for rich Internet applications such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback.

The demo features an enhanced navigation interface that, among other things, provides an almost 3D-like map control over Virtual Earth 2D views. You can rotate the map to orient the view to your liking, a feature that I would like to see added to our Virtual Earth powered Live Search Maps someday so that I can view my driving directions with my target destination shown at the top of the map which currently always denotes north. This would keep me from making the wrong left and right turns I sometimes make along my drive because I am following a route in my mind that was mapped with north positioned top screen while I am actually driving south. (Okay ... remember that I'm a marketing guy.) John Nelson of IDV discusses the demo's navigation scheme in more detail here in his blog.

Additionally, the demo provides slick annotation capabilities. A description of this can also be found on IDV's blog (here) so I won't cover it all, but I would like to quickly call out a particularly cool feature which is the ability to create what I am going to call multi-point polygons. You can trace an area on the map to create a filled polygon, much as you might in Live Search Maps using the polygon tool there, but IDV provides the ability to add to the trace what they are calling "tics" and users of Adobe products might consider "nodes" ... points along that line that can be added, deleted but more importantly adjusted to provide a highly precise outline. Wow. I like the user empowerment!

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For those of you who still insist on providing maps to your users that are locked down and don't provide the interaction found with a Virtual Earth powered web site, this demo provides the ability to export to KML. It also allows you to export your drawings as an SQL Server 2008-ready spatial script.

Read John's blog entries and then take some time to have some fun with the demo. You will need to have the latest addition of Silverlight installed and can get that here.

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