Virtual Earth Mashup does web services one better

Ken posted this last week but I haven't had a chance to try it out.

Now that I have - I have to say, "wow - that was easy".

I had previously signed up to the MapPoint web services to see how we could use those. I'm sorry but the whole registration and entire process of using the web services made it a chore. The Virtual Earth SDK is how every web tool should offer itself over the web.

I love MapPoint (although I have a separate post brewing in me about my latest trip through Penn State with it) - but the fact that I could say "Show me directions" and then switch over to the source code tab to copy and paste it into my very own web page totally rocks.

Well done! This should be a model for how VS automatically creates web services - it's not enough to show the sample call, show an example of how it works and then show the code behind it.

Does it dumb down developers? I don't think so - this is just like "Full Code Intellisense" - let me tell you what I want to do, you give me the starting point and I'll take it from there. (and while i'm sure there are some code jockeys out there who believe that Intellisense is the single worst idea in the world - I'm sure most beg to differ)

The Virtual Earth Interactive SDK

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Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

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