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One of the projects we had the chance of working with a while back, but hadn’t gone live due to licensing and policy reasons, finally made it and is now publicly available at www.meteo.gr/bingmaps/.
We had a lot of fun in this project as there were a few challenges we had to overcome, let me give you the insights on one of them to get an idea and possibly help your future Bing maps projects 
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The biggest challenge we faced was how we were going to draw Contours over the map. To that end we read the very useful Practical C# Charts and Graphics book and found out all about Triangulation a technology widely used in Topography. Using Triangulation we’ve eventually developed a solution, only to find that it didn’t work as expected. The algorithm was correct, but when dealing with millions of points to draw shapes (vector graphics) over Bing maps performance degraded rapidly and this was unacceptable.
So next we thought that instead of drawing shapes over the map, it would be faster if we could just place another tile layer over the map, where all shapes would be pre-rendered. We were right the navigation was very fast but generating the Tiles still took very long and consumed a lot of resources which was a problem. The algorithm was still very complicated.
Finally, Dimosthenis had a very cool idea, that solved our problem. Since the data points are so close to each other, if we just drew a small rectangle (as you shown in the image) with the appropriate color for each point, the rectangles’ edges would create an area that with the proper imaging ease function would appear as a contour. We’ve started working on it and it truly not only drastically reduced the tile generation but also the result was very satisfying.
We hope you like it and use it.
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Back from my holidays and straight to work. Reading through my emails though, I came by one where one of my friends have noticed that I’ve neglected to post my Silverlight Out Of Browser Applications presentation content. So with my deepest apologies here it is. < </iframe>
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Since I’ve started talking about Sliverlight and analytics yesterday I thought this is probably the best opportunity to mention Silverlytics (Silverlight + Analytics). Built by Location3 Media an interactive marketing company, Silverlytics is a multitenant Windows Azure-based analytics service that uses Microsoft Live Labs Pivot for its data visualization. All of its data is collected
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A common misunderstanding and argument I get, for not building web applications using Silverlight technology, is often, the lack of a way to keep stats of your application traffic. So I thought this worth a blog post in order to put a few things right and let people know that there is actually a solution they could use. This solution is Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework . Microsoft
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I’m going to be speaking at the next DotNetZone event on a very interesting topic namely IoC (Inversion of Control) and on how using " Prism " and it's friend Unity (an implementation of IoC) from the Patterns and Practices team that can help in building Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity. In talking with various colleagues and customers
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DevDays 09 part 2 : Silverlight 3 See the light! If you're unable to attend catch the live stream (RSVP now!) starting at 9.30 AM GMT+2 Athens time. Online TV Shows by Ustream
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If you’re into Silverlight/WPF development you’ll surely appreciate Karl Shifflett’s XAML Power Toys: http://tinyurl.com/karlpowertoys Awesome (free) tool for WPF/Silverlight. XAML Power Toys Full Feature Set includes Create ViewModel Class - from a VB.NET or C# code window, easily create a ViewModel stub that includes commands and exposed data class. Optionally you can elect to re-implement
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Yesterday, I had the chance to speak in front of an audience about how ready is Silverlight for your business applications at a Microsoft DevDay event. I really enjoyed it as I was mainly showing code and demos (did 7 demos in 1h.30m which is a personal record) instead of doing PowerPoint slides, and talked about a lot of new features coming up with Silverlight 3. I hope everyone enjoyed
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It’s been almost a year since I last talked about Microsoft's Hosted Deep Zoom project . It then was a simple Ajax – silverlight enabled web application that enabled you to dynamically deepzoom and share your images. A lot have changed since then as I discovered today. To begin with, the project has been renamed to Deepzoompix and a lot of cool new features have been added making it
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Most of the large control suite vendors have already started releasing their offerings for the Silverlight platform. One of those, namely divelements , has put together a couple of samples on what you can do with their controls. So if you are interested in building line of business applications in Silverlight such as an mail client, word processing, or something similar, check out http://divelements.co.uk/silverlight/
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