Windows Live Quick Apps - Mashup apps with source code

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Steve Ballmer announced today two example apps that show off how to put the Live Services we have on offer to use.  The apps "Contoso Bicycle Club" and "Contoso University" were developed by two UK Parters, AWS and Conchango in association with Microsoft UK.  They incorporate many Live Services some of which are still in alpha to highlight the art of the possible.  The apps themselves are very cool featuring some of my favourite technologies, like Virtual Earth and Silverlight and best of all the source code is available on Codeplex.

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My favourite part of the Contoso Bicycle app is the way you can watch the cyclist go around London in the video and their progress is tracked simultaneously in the Virtual Earth pane just below - the position being indicated by an icon.  This is only available on the London bike ride though.  The guys from AWS & Conchango describe how they did it:

I mounted a video camera to the front of my bike. This gave us a video in MPEG format. I also had my Garmin eTrex Legend GPS unit set to record a track log.

When I got back to the office I uploaded the track log using EasyGPS in GPX format and wrote some code to process the tracklog and generate an Expression media Encoder project file.

So we used Expression Media encoder to "Stripe" the video with the GPS positions using key frames.

We then uploaded the Video to the Silverlight Streaming Service.

As we playback the video, it raises onMarkerReached events which we intercept and use to update the map.

Pretty cool effect I think you'll agree.

What’s the link? I want to see these apps!

Here are the some more links:

Technorati Tags: Windows Live, Live Services, Virtual Earth, Silverlight, Windows Live Quick Apps