Working with VEColor class of VirtualEarth SDK

If you ever wanted to set a color for a custom VEShape object of type polyline or polygon than you must be familiar with the VEColor class that is used to represent a color in VirtualEarth SDK.

I am sure there are reasons behind of the design of the VEColor class, but for those who are used to a standard Web color representation in a form of 6-digit hexadecimal number it's kind of weird to provide 3 integer number in order to construct a color.

So I was in a search for some convenient ways of converting between VEColor and standard Web color and first place I looked through was of course the VirtualEarth Map control because I thought that the VE developers themselves would need a way to perform the same exercise. No surprise there is a couple of non-documented VE objects to support such conversion technique.

Here is a code example of using those objects:

// Create a convertor class
var converter = new VEHexStringToColor();
// Converter returns an instance of a VEColor class
// Transparency value is always set to 1.0
var veColor = converter.Convert("aabbcc");
// Adjust transparency value
veColor.A = 0.7;
// Convert VEColor to a string with a leading '#'
var webColor = VEColorToHexString(veColor);alert(webColor);

Both objects are available on the page after you reference a VE Map control v6.1. Of course there is no guarantee of any support of those objects in any future versions of the VE Map control so use it at your own risk and have fun.