ESRI Online Services + Microsoft Virtual Earth

An announcement from ESRI and Microsoft.

Users of ESRI’s ArcGIS will now be able to directly load base map data from the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform into the ArcGIS 9.3 Desktop and Explorer. Data layers will include the high resolution street maps, imagery, and hybrid that we have become accustom to seeing in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

Access to this data requires a subscription to ArcGIS Online Service.

Imagery can be previewed at http://resources.esri.com/arcgisonlineservices.

Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control

Using the Virtual Earth map in your web page is nothing new. What is new about this control is that you can drop it into your ASP.NET project in Visual Studio and get it running without the need for any client side JavaScript. All of the parameters can be set in Visual Studio and all of the code to manipulate and interact with the map and map data and can be written in server side .net code.

The Windows Live Dev Blog points out that the map can be made even more interactive through the use of ASP.NET AJAX.

This control is one of several that Microsoft is offering as part of their Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.

Shapefile to GeoRSS for Google Maps

The most recent version of Shape2Earth includes a functional prototype for converting shapefiles to a GeoRSS format. It currently works with simple lines and points. Attribute data can be selected to be embedded in the GeoRSS feed.

Select the attributes you wish to export to GeoRSS

Attributes can be embedded in the xml, listed as a table, or both

GeoRSS is a very popular format, and is particularly useful for serving data to web mapping applications such as Google Maps.

View the Google Map/GeoRSS sample to see how point GIS data can be viewed.