Programming in the cloud presentation

This last Thursday night I had the pleasure of giving a presentation to Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA).  First and foremost I would like to thank the leaders, members and guests from the group.  It was an enthusiastic crowd that had lots of good questions and ideas to share.  You guys totally rock:

The presentation

I came up with the idea for the presentation when Brad Jones, the President of the user group asked me in an e-mail a couple of weeks ago "What are you going to talk about?".  I thought about some of the topics that have been "hot" lately.  Programming against the Facebook has come up a lot lately.  I showed a demo of a Facebook application at the last round of ArcReady programs.  Dave Bost and I just published an episode of The Thirsty Developer on the Facebook Developer Toolkit.  So I thought about putting together a presentation about how to tap into the various APIs that exist out on the Internet.  Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are my favorite social networks and all of them have very rich APIs.  I thought I would also throw in a little Virtual Earth action to round it out. 

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The Code

I showed a couple of examples during the presentation.  The first sample, which was tapping into the Virtual Earth APIs using the JavaScript. The sample was pretty basic, and it was meant to show how quickly you could add a map to your site:

To setup a map like this you need to reference the JavaScript file on the live.com website.  You also need to setup a <div> tag that is the target of the map.  In the body tag of the HTML. Call a function, in my case it was GetMap().  The rest of the work is done with the following JavaScript which loads the map, adds the pushpins from an array using a JavaScript prototype object.

<script type="text/javascript"  src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=5"></script>     
<script type="text/javascript">
    var map = null;

    //prototype object
    function event(name,location,date,lat,lon)
    {
        this.name=name
        this.location=location
        this.date=date
        this.lat=lat
        this.lon=lon
    }
    //An array of event objects (would come from a web service or database call)   
    var Events = new Array(
            new event("IndyNDA Meeting", "Indianapolis, IN", "2/10/2008", 39.889504,-86.121899),
            new event("Devcares", "Carmel, IN", "8/30/2007", 39.927089,-86.1516),
            new event("ArcReady", "Carmel, IN", "2/21/2008", 39.927089,-86.1516),
            new event("MSDN Event", "Indianapolis, IN", "2/7/1008", 39.927087, -86.025579)
                        );

     // Loads the map and sets the center
    function GetMap()
    {        
        map = new VEMap('myMap');
        map.LoadMap();
        AddEvents();
        // uncoment the next line to Zoom in on Indy and center the map there
        map.SetCenterAndZoom(new VELatLong(39.889504,-86.121899), 11);
    }

    // function to add the individual events to the map
    function AddEvents()
    {
        for (i in Events)
        {
            var shape = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Pushpin, new VELatLong(Events[i].lat,Events[i].lon))
            shape.SetTitle(Events[i].name)
            shape.SetDescription(Events[i].location)
            map.AddShape(shape)
        }
    }
</script>

This code snippet is provided under the Microsoft Permissive License

The HTML page it included in a zip file on this blog entry, it to is distributed under the Microsoft Permissive License.  The permissive license is an OSI approved shared source license.  It does not require you to share your source code with anyone, but if you do something cool building on this sample, please considering sharing it with others.

I will do a walk through of the Silverlight Interface to Virtual Earth in a forthcoming blog post.

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