Office + Virtual Earth Maps

  • Article

Hi there!

Long time, no blogging. Shame. I've been hiding in my cave (office) for the last month or so getting ready all the content and great news we are about to release next week at Tech Ed Developers. This time I unfortunately can't make it to the conference, but my heart has been at Tech Ed for a while. I'll be blogging almost every day next week so I can (remotely) share some of the great news for Office and SharePoint developers.

In the meantime, I'll start by blogging about a recently released set of OBA articles and code sample download:

I've always been a fan of solutions that integrate different Microsoft products and technologies. This is what people in the field are trying to accomplish and sometimes it's hard to find articles or code samples that show you how to put the pieces together.

Some time ago, my friend Imtiyaz Mubarack, who is a senior consultant and expert in Office development, told me that he was working on a solution that integrates Virtual Earth maps with Excel 2007 and Visual Studio Tools for Office SE. We thought it would be a great idea to share all the knots & bolts with the developer community, so Imitiyaz and Jeff House from Advaiya, Inc. created a two part article and a code sample download with all the details.

Part 1 shows how to quickly develop and implement a business intelligence application with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools Second Edition for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, Virtual Earth Map Control 6.0, and Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Part 2 shows how to add data to a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 worksheet using automation to format cells as well as create charts and send data for pushpins on the map and export charts images.

The best part of these articles is the code. It's quite clean and it shows how to create a solution like this from scratch. The Virtual Earth Map team did code and tech reviews to this solution and just like me, they were delighted with the outcome. This really is a great set of articles and code samples. Hopefully in the near future we will be getting more content from Advaiya, inc.

Speaking of Virtual Earth integration with Office solutions, you should also check out Jim Crowley's blog post about integrating Virtual Earth Maps and Search Server Sites.