Reflections on Software Development

When the July 2008 CTP of Live Tools were released a few weeks ago, I was kind of impressed with the Map control. I finally had a chance yesterday to read more about it and develop my own simple testing page. You may need to download this CTP release first before reading the rest of this post.

Implementation

Here is the 5 steps to implement this control into any ASP.NET page:

1. When you create a new website, select “ASP.NET Windows Live Web Site” as a template:

2. Be sure that “Microsoft.Live.ServerControls.VE.dll” is in the Bin directory:

3. Be sure that “Virtual Earth” tab is in the Toolbox:

4. Drag the “Map” control and drop it into the ASP.NET page, and play around with some of the attributes in it:

Note: Latitude and longitude of any location can be found in Terraserver. This sample demonstrates the aerial view of a mall that is very near to my house.

5. Press the magic key (F5) to build and view the sample page:

Download

This sample can be downloaded via here.