James Fee GIS Blog

Steve Lombardi and Chris Pendleton have both blogged about the new release of Microsoft Virtual Earth (and Live Maps). Steve sums it up:
This ended up being a much bigger release than originally planned including three full sprints of development. As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the [...]

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Microsoft Virtual Earth - MapCruncher has its own webpage and a commercial license so commercial users can now use the product. You can download the MapCruncher beta here.
What is weird is that I’ve got both the MSR MapCruncher and the new Virtual Earth MapCruncher installed now and they both seem to be the same [...]

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I love using Virtual Earth because the imagery is so great compared to Google’s (at least in the areas I’m interested in). The reason why is the UltraCamX imagery that Microsoft uses. LiveSide.net has a small window into the UltraCam and how impressive its results are.

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Thanks to Paul Ramsey, Bill Dollins, Morten Nielsen and others, Microsoft has said that they plan to implement longitude-latitude ordering in WKB and WKT for both the geography and geometry types. Bill put it best IMO as to why this change needed to happen with SQL Server 2008.
For me, the issue is consistency. Regardless [...]

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Good news for those who want to take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Spatial and ArcGIS.
ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.3 software, the next scheduled release of ESRI’s ArcGIS suite, will take full advantage of the new spatial technology in the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008. With the November SQL Server 2008 community technology preview (CTP), Microsoft [...]

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I just got this tidbit of information from a friend who talked to Ed Katibah (lead Program Manager for SQL Spatial).
Spatial datatype, methods and indexes will be supported equally on all SQL Server editions (Express, Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise) at no extra charge. That means anyone who wants to use the SQL Server 2008 [...]

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