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Last week I worked the GIS in the Rockies show in Loveland, Colorado. I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet with representatives from local agencies of my home State and show them how Virtual Earth could augment their business intelligence applications and citizen services web sites. Steve Milroy, also from the Virtual Earth team, presented to a full house, doing a technical deep dive and showing how Virtual Earth brings GIS data (including ESRI ArcGIS data) to life through its powerful visualization capabilities. I also drew a sizeable crowd during my Vendor Showcase presentation (the best draw at the show, I am told), demonstrating Virtual Earth in action through our Virtual Earth powered Live Search Maps consumer destination site.
Also present at the event was the Geospatial team from Idea Integration, Microsoft 2008 Partner of the Year, who provides consulting services including development of GIS solutions with Virtual Earth as the visualization engine. Despite the ease of developing Virtual Earth based data visualization applications, many small local governments do not have internal resources to do their own development. These customers turn to Microsoft partners like Idea Integration that are experienced in building applications using Microsoft Application Program Interfaces (APIs). Idea was also very helpful to me in manning the Virtual Earth booth and grabbed this snapshot of me helping customers. Thanks team!

When I am at these events, I often get the opportunity to learn about new and different applications being developed on the Virtual Earth platform. While at GIS in the Rockies I was approached by Dave Bouwman of Data Transfer Solutions (DTS) based in Fort Collins, CO. Dave shared a couple of applications that his organization has developed including the below Texas Forest Service portal. This site was created by DTS as a quick demo illustrating how GIS data layers can be integrated into the Virtual Earth environment. The user interface components (the menus, sliders, this tab etc) are all created using their DojoToolkit, an open-source javascript framework that allows developers to quickly create robust windows-style user interfaces in standard web pages. The GIS data layers are integrated via a tile service, which utilizes ESRI ArcGIS Server to render the images. The tiles are dynamically cached so the performance of the site continually improves. The fire occurrence point locations are pulled directly from a tabular data source, run through a clustering algorithm, and sent to the browser via Ajax.
The screenshot speaks to the features and functionality of the site, allowing you to turn on and off data layers through the layer control in the left panel. Love the sliders that allow to control the opacity of the raster data layers.
DTS has other Virtual Earth demos that can be found on their DojoToolkit demo site.

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