Yesterday Marc Schweigert (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) did a webcast presentation titled "Adding Mapping Capabilities to your Applications with Virtual Earth and ASP.NET AJAX". Near the end of the presentation, he mentioned the PietschSoft.VE project and gave the link to it on CodePlex and the Live Demo site. This mention is located in slide 32 of the Powerpoint deck from the presentation.

You'll be able to view the webcast online, after the fact.

The presentation was top notch. It covered implementing Virtual Earth within HTML and using the different features of Virtual Earth. He then went on to domonstrate using VE with ASP.NET, and also did a demo of a prototype ASP.NET AJAX Control that he built as a control extender. He was going to demo my control during the presentation (I know this because he emailed me about it), but I don't have alot of the really cool AJAXiness implemented yet.

Microsoft's Interest

I am really seeing (based on interest in the control from Marc and others) that Microsoft isn't planning on creating an ASP.NET VE control any time soon. I figure, if they were, he wouldn't be giving a plug to my control during his presentations.

What about the AJAX Control Toolkit?

On a related note, you may ask why I don't see if they'll include my control in the AJAX Control Toolkit. Well, I actually did talk with those guys about that back in December, and they didn't want to include it because of its dependance on Virtual Earth. They don't want to have to put out a new version of the toolkit when a new version of VE gets released (therefore adding to the pain of managing the toolkit).

This encouragement to keep working on PietschSoft.VE just keeps on coming!!