Virtual Earth: Map Control Development
I have data from ARC/INFO Generate (ASCII) Metadata Cartographic Boundary Files. These are coordinates and can be loaded into SQLServer with their metadata (county name, state and county numbers, etc).
Then on a VEMap I can draw every county polygon. Is this the most efficient
What other datasets and means are there to just as nice of job
Okay I'm assuming that you haven't implemented this and looking for a best practice solution. If thats the case, its a juggling between how much control you need over the polygon vs. difficulty in programming.
If you don't care about the auto-zoom/lack of styling associated with GeoRSS file uploading, its much simpler to convert your boundary file into a GeoRSS file through an intermediate app, upload it to local live, and then reference it with your VE app.
The more difficult route is to bring up the stored points from your database using AJAX to the VE application and use the map.addpolygon() function. This way you can set what your polygon will look like and disable/enable your counties accordingly. This route is more recommended because it seems you need more control of your data.
Hope that helps.
Maybe the guys at infusion are playing with a version we don't have access too
I would be seriously looking at tile layers for any large data set, that is you render out tiles either on demand or static to overlay the map. Polygons and polyline work well but there is a limit to how many you can draw.
There is the start of products availible for this or you could build your own process:
http://support.mapdotnet.com/wiki/Wiki%20Pages/VE%20Tile%20Overlays.aspx
John.