Next Steps:
Step #1 – Download the Tools for Windows 8 App Development
Step #2 – Download Visual Studio Express for Windows 8
Step #3 – Start building your own Apps for Windows 8

Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes or RSS

If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Websites:

• Getting started with Windows 8 Apps
• How to Sell Your Apps and Make Money in the Windows Store
• Attend a Windows 8 Developer Camp and Hackathon in your area!

Blogs & Articles:

• Jerry Nixon’s Blog
• Get Started with Bing Maps

Videos:

• Microsoft DevRadio: Managing Your Windows 8 Enterprise Apps with Windows Intune
• Microsoft DevRadio: Your Top Windows Store Questions Answered

Virtual Labs:

• Windows 8 Virtual Labs

Apple CEO tells you to BING it

Windows Azure SQL Database

Kinect in the Movies

Coding marathon sets world record

• Bing Fund
• Maccabees Kinect Video
• Bing Maps releases 215TB of birds eye imagery
• MSNBC.com will become NBCNews.com

As always, you can follow Paul on Twitter or subscribe to Paul on Facebook.  Larry is fun too: @LarryLa.

You can learn more about these plugins and download them here.

Microsoft on the ones and twos!

Hacker hired

Xbox 360: Not just for games

Panoramic street views

Session : Building applications with Bing Maps : what is the opportunity for ISVs

Speaker : Johannes Kebeck, Microsoft Account Technical
Specialist Mappoint ' Microsoft UK

ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle talks with Jared Vogt, Avalara's CTO, about how they developed the services, how they needed to think about moving an application from their data centers into Windows Azure. When they wanted to show on a map how a tax is calculated, they turned to Windows Azure and Bing Maps. Jared provides a demo too of GeoSalesTax.com.

About Avalara

Avalara is a leader in providing sales tax service online. The company provides the sales tax calculation services as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering using Windows Server and SQL Server.

Headquartered in Bainbridge Island, WA, Avalara is the recognized leader in web-based sales tax solutions, and is transforming the sales and use tax compliance process for businesses of all sizes. Avalara’s AvaTax family of products provides end-to-end compliance solutions and is regarded as the fastest, easiest, most accurate and affordable way for companies to address their statutory tax requirements. Avalara is the industry's most trusted provider of sales and use tax automation solutions and is one of America’s fastest growing companies earning recognitions such as Microsoft’s SaaS Partner of the Year for 2010.

Other ISV Videos

For videos on Windows Azure Platform, see:

• Accumulus Makes Subscription Billing Easy for Windows Azure
• Azure Email-Enables Lists, Low-Cost Storage for SharePoint
• Credit Card Processing for Windows Phone 7 on Windows Azure
• Crowd-Sourcing Public Sector App for Windows Phone, Azure
• Food Buster Game Achieves Scalability with Windows Azure
• BI Solutions Join On-Premises To Windows Azure Using Star Analytics Command Center
• StorSimple Integrates On-Premises, Cloud Storage with Windows Azure
• How Quark Promote Hosts Multiple Tenants on Windows Azure
• NewsGator Moves 3 Million Blog Posts Per Day on Azure

The Location Service for Windows Phone 7 uses a combination of GPS, cell-tower data, and even Wi-Fi data to determine the phone's longitude, latitude, altitude, course, speed, and more.

Click here to download the source code for this app at the Silverlight for Windows Phone Code Gallery.

For example, a tag using several of the options would look like this:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="300" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="5" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="48.8756271_2.3493838" Pushpin="48.8756271_2.3493838" Culture="fr_FR"]

or:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="400" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="17" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667" Culture="en-GB"]</p>

In order to use this plugin, you’ll need to first create a Bing Maps Key here. For further instructions, check out Kebeck’s post.

The Taxi Fare Calculator app was developed by Ricky Brundritt, and, as you may imagine, it lets you enter in a starting address and end address and then see what the cab fare may be, as well as the shortest route. Fare estimates are based on rates for cabs in the area, and include pick-up rates and by-the-miles costs, as applicable.

Obviously, this map app is extremely handy, which is why everyone was raving about it.

Now the Bing Team has revealed that the app is the official winner of the contest, news which was announced via a video on MSDN's Channel 9. Brundritt, as the grand-prize winner, won $1000.

The other winners included in GeoSales Tax and Ricky’s Data Viewer

From this menu, you can select one of the following: “clip art,” “videos,” “webpages,” and “Maps and Places.” Using any of these options lets you automatically insert content pulled from Bing, but probably the most useful will be the option to insert content from Bing Maps.

When you select this option, a task pane opens on the right-hand side of your screen, allowing you to search for a location or pull up a location you’ve previously saved. You can optionally edit the details of the item or just click “insert” to add it to your email.

That’s definitely a handy feature to have when trying to share directions via email – you don’t even have to go to another web page, you can do it all from your inbox.

When you load up the app for the first time, you’ll see the mobile food carts represented on the map (hilariously) as sporks, not pushpins. You can then filter vendors by prices, neighborhood, features and cuisine.

The Food Cart Finder isn’t Bing’s first map app with a hyperlocal focus. “Local Lens,” which launched in February is probably the most notable of Bing’s hometown-focused mapplications. This app displays blog posts and news articles as an additional map layer across a select number of U.S. cities. For example, an article about road construction would be pinned to the area of the highway being worked on. A robbery story would be pinned to the house or business where it took place.

Oodle Rentals is also a somewhat hyperlocal map app, too, as it allows you to search for and locate nearby rental properties from classified site oodle.com. All of these map apps and more can be found at bing.com/maps. 

“You can create dynamic maps that allow your visitors to pan and zoom, or static maps that don't have those features,” it reads. You can choose from Road maps, Aerial maps, Aerial maps showing the road labels, or a 3D Birdseye map.

To use the plugin, you just add a shortcode to your post like this, for example:

[bingMap location="Buenos Aires, Argentina" zoom="13"]

Or a more complex shortcode using all the available attributes may look like this:

[bingMap location=”Seattle, WA” width=”250” height"=”250” title=”Bing Maps Rocks” type=”dynamic” maptype=”AerialWithLabels” zoom=”15” pp1=”Seattle, WA”]

To use the plugin, you’ll first need a free Bing Maps Key. Then you can download and install the plugin from here.

The data in OSM comes from people who record it using GPS devices as well as from free satellite imagery. Once online, it can then be edited by anyone who may know more about a particular area or spots an error. At present, there are around 250,000 users contributing to the project.

By adding OSM as a layer in Bing Maps, you can now easily access this rich data from a familiar source: Bing. The data hasn’t been modified in any way, except to fit into the “tile schema” of Bing Maps, explains Chris Pendleton via blog post. Also of note, the data is being hosted on Windows Azure CDN, which is designed to support globally distributed apps such as this.

As you may imagine, the app lets you enter in a starting address and end address and then see what the cab fare may be, as well as the shortest route. (Quick, we need a mobile version of this for tourists!)

Fare estimates are based on rates for cabs in the area, and include pick-up rates and by-the-miles costs, as applicable.

This map app is actually one of many great entries in the contest, several of which are featured here. Other apps include a “World of Football” app, a data viewer app, a pharmacy finder and more.

But the cab fare is my favorite, maybe it’s yours too?

(via Mashable and Bing Team Blog)

Engadget (via MIT’s Technology Review) uncovered a cool Microsoft Research project called “Street Slide” view. The project attempts to create a new interface for viewing the street-level photos used in online applications like Bing Maps Streetside View.

As explained on the project’s homepage, today’s mapping applications enable users to virtually visit cities by way of “immersive 360 degree panoramas, or bubbles.” Users move from bubble to bubble, but this doesn’t necessarily provide the best visual sense of a city street.

With Street Slide, the researchers took the best aspects of the “immersive bubbles” and transformed them into multi-perspective strip panoramas. You can actually slide out of a bubble to see the street from a different perspective – a strip that’s viewed from a greater difference. When viewed in this mode, the empty space above and below the strip could be used for business logos and building numbers (addresses), or even ads.

According to the MIT article, the researchers have already made a version of this technology for mobile devices, including the iPhone. “It broadens out your visual sense to cover a two-block radius,” says Michael Cohen, a senior scientist at Microsoft Research.

Who’s hoping for a WP7 phone implementation of this tech? I know I am. In case I didn’t explain this too well, you can see Street Slide in action in the video here.

Here, blue dots on the map show the location of these stories which can also be identified by theme (like “love,” “family,” reunions,” etc.)

It’s not too late to submit your story for inclusion, either. Facebook is still asking for submissions – details can be found via the Facebook blog here.

To view the map, head over to this page on Facebook: stories.facebook.com

Now there comes another Tour de France map, this one showing both the Tour de France course and tour updates via geo-tagged tweets. The new map, hosted here on Livestrong.com (scroll down), highlights Twitter updates by way of blue-colored pushpins which, when clicked, reveal the tweet’s text.

As the race continues, fans will be able to read these geo-tagged tweets, containing reactions and content from spectators, journalists and even some of the Tour de France competitors themselves, like Lance Armstrong of Team Radioshack, whose Twitter account is followed by 2.5 million fans.

The map interface uses the Bing Twitter Map App’s “embed” function for this custom creation dubbed “Tour Talk.” You can check it out here along with lots of other Tour de France news. 

(via the Bing team blog)

In order to view the new content in WWT, viewers will need to download the new WWT|Mars experience.

However, using WWT isn’t the only way to access the imagery. Thanks to Bing Maps’ application gallery, the Bing WorldWide Telescope Map App has been updated to include the Mars additions. Web surfers can immediately view the content using their browser via the Silverlight site.

To use this feature, click the “Maps Apps” button then the “WorldWide Telescope” map app. When it loads, choose “Mars” from the list of collections.

Along the course, pushpins indicate the start and finish points and waypoints like feed zones and hill climbs are also indicated. At the top of the map is an interactive chart that displays the various elevation and slope changes for the selected stage. You can also see weather predictions via the “Stages” tab on the left and daily results from the “Results” tab.

The map, notes a post on the Bing Maps blog, is much better than the PDF that’s featured on the Tour de France’s official homepage. I’d have to agree with that, for sure.

If you’re still more interested in World Cup madness, though, don’t forget about the Bing World Cup map app and the Bing Home Turf Finder map app, two other great map apps the team recently launched. 

In the music section, you can find lyrics, photos, videos and tour dates for your favorite artist or band, but even more notable, you can stream music. By integrating Zune into Bing, there’s access to over 5 million songs available for your listening pleasure. And if you want to buy a track, Bing points you to Zune, iTunes and Amazon.com’s MP3 store.

A second integration from Microsoft Games provides access to detailed information on over 35,000 games including reviews, cheats, walkthroughs and more. Plus, almost 100 casual games are available to play right from within Bing. Just search for a game and then click the “Play Now” button that appears under the listing.

Finally, there’s video. Bing now offers thousands of episodes from 1500+ shows, thanks to new partnerships with Hulu, Viacom and CBS. This “Bing TV” section will serve as a one-stop-shop for online TV viewing, offering everything from clips to full episodes and even local listings.

Movies aren’t left out either: reviews from critics, Facebook and Twitter sentiment, and other info from Bing Maps that helps you navigate to your favorite theater are included here.

Everything except the TV listings should be live now – those will come over the next couple of weeks. Zune music playback is also ramping up now – more songs will be available in a few days.