Five on Nine - Pilot Episode

Virtual Earth is now in 3D! Here, Charles chats with Duncan Lawler, Development Manager on the Virtual Earth team. His team of sharpshooter developers have written a fully managed API that will render any type of coordinate
data into 3-D space. You can program against a scriptable API or you can create applications on top of the VE 3-D platform from any managed language in VS 2005. Very cool stuff... Tune in.
When you're done here,
head over to check out on10's coverage of VE3D.
dentaku wrote:The XBOX 360 controller support is great. I just installed it and it works very well.
Unfortunately my DSL connection isn't as fast at the network at MS so the data doesn't load quite as smoothly as it did in this video.
This HAS to be re-renamed Virtual Earth.
live.local.com tells me nothing about the product and is VERY hard to remember.
dentaku wrote:The XBOX 360 controller support is great. I just installed it and it works very well.
Unfortunately my DSL connection isn't as fast at the network at MS so the data doesn't load quite as smoothly as it did in this video.
This HAS to be re-renamed Virtual Earth.
live.local.com tells me nothing about the product and is VERY hard to remember.
Jack Poison wrote:
dentaku wrote: The XBOX 360 controller support is great. I just installed it and it works very well.
Unfortunately my DSL connection isn't as fast at the network at MS so the data doesn't load quite as smoothly as it did in this video.
This HAS to be re-renamed Virtual Earth.
live.local.com tells me nothing about the product and is VERY hard to remember.
LOL You mean local.live.com..![]()
One more reason to re-name it.
"Hey, friends, check this cool thing out! It's so neat! 3D Maps! Just go to local dot live dot com, and you'll see it.."
compared to
"Hey, friends, check out Google Earth. It's so cool!" (Search for Google Earth on Google, and its the first result returned)
Guess what people will remember?
For what it's worth: I vote to change it back to Virtual Earth... If the web site isn't taken.
When they advertised "new dimension in search", I couldn't guess that they mean it "Literally"
Nice upgrade though.
Memory usage gets really high here to the point where my machine starts thrashing. (1 gig of RAM)
Xaero_Vincent wrote:This seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google Earth and quite redundent if you ask me.
Google Earth now has the major advantage of natively running on Windows, OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.
Regards,
Vincent
Rory wrote:
Linux is redundant.
Already had Unix. Already had other operating systems.
Don't need Linux.
(Do you see how tiring comments like these can get? Do we need them in every thread?)
Xaero_Vincent wrote:
Rory wrote:
Linux is redundant.
Already had Unix. Already had other operating systems.
Don't need Linux.
(Do you see how tiring comments like these can get? Do we need them in every thread?)
We dont need Windows either.
Anyway...
In my opinion, cross-platform support is a key advantage when competiting products rival eachother otherwise.
Rory wrote:(and better)
Rory wrote:
2. Your opinion has been noted. Considering that this is a desktop app, and considering that Linux and FreeBSD have extremely little desktop market penetration, I don't think it's a big deal. And OS X users are used to being left out (I know - I'm one of 'em).
Pretty...
Reusable...
<html><script src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v4/mapcontrol.js" >var map;</script><body onload="(map = new VEMap('myMap')).LoadMap(new VELatLong(47.621811, -122.349057), 19, 'h',
false, VEMapMode.Mode3D, true);"><div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:1024px;height:768px;"></div></body></html>
Cool!
Xaero_Vincent wrote:
Rory wrote: (and better)
Thats purely subjective and expected from a biased employee.
Xaero_Vincent wrote:
Rory wrote:
2. Your opinion has been noted. Considering that this is a desktop app, and considering that Linux and FreeBSD have extremely little desktop market penetration, I don't think it's a big deal. And OS X users are used to being left out (I know - I'm one of 'em).
Thanks for noting it. If Linux and FreeBSD werent so insignificant, your excuse would be as vague as your remark about Mac OS X, correct?
Rory wrote:
I suppose that yours is somehow a much more objective point of view.
Rory wrote:
I honestly don't know what you mean by this.
jsampsonPC wrote:When will I be able to pull this into a Desktop Application and have it automatically display geographical information extracted from my datasource?
I can't even try it out from here...the install of the control fails with a message saying it's currently not available for my language or region.
I don't *expect* to be able to see my part of the world in glorious 3D just now, I just wanted to look at the rest, play with the API, gaze in awe at 3D globe (the Earth was, last I knew, not US-specific).
And is a 3D mapping control really going to choke on New Zealand English?
Chalk up one for geographical chauvinism.
[C]
I had a bit of a poke around with Reflector, and the Microsoft.MapPoint.MapControl3D.MapControl class that implements the 3D view does in fact derive from System.Windows.Forms.Control, so it ought to fit right in in a .net app.
It probably goes against the license agreement though, I think officially you are only supposed to use it by embedding a webbrowser control and accessing it via the Javascript API.
Anyone want to give it a try?
Also I was thinking maybe you could add some aeroplanes or a cockpit view
Its quicker to load this up and get better satellite imagery then it is to load up FSX and start a quick flight around my neighbourhood
You can use orca to remove the locale requirementscro wrote:Virtual Earth 3D (Beta) currently does not support your region or language. Thanks for your patience.
Is there a way to force the installation ?
B_e_l_i_e_v_er wrote:How did you manage to add that reference, I cant find anyway of clicking on that directory and no way of actually typing in that reference. I can see its there but cant figure out how to add a reference to it
Little help please...
How does one use the managed map control within a managed desktop app? Where can it be downloaded from?
Can you see roads & stuff? I know only major cities get the 3D models & birds-eye-view. So if you don't see roads & stuff, they're probably filtering it based on IP address.cro wrote:Thanks Minh! I have been able to install it.
Except for the DEM, the only thing that I was able to see in 3D was the Status of Liberty. Any idea ?
In hybrid mode I can view road and other information. The bird eye view also work fine. Strange...
I see from the Virtual Earth team blog (which I can't reply to because it keeps returning a server error) that
a) the language/region blocking is to prevent problems with locales that use commas as their decimal separator
b) They got around this by blocking the install in all regions other than "our 4 officially supported English locales"
I'm not sure which to more furious about here, the fact that my locale is apparently regarded as a toy version of English and not officially supported (have you considered that that means we are probably stupid to use Windows in government departments?), or
the fact that the solution chosen was so, well...not reflecting as much thought as we might expect.
Has nobody heard of CultureInfo.NumberFormat?
It's not hard to tell what people are using and make appropriate allowances.
dunclaw wrote:Just give us a couple of days to run a test pass and get the bugs out so we can deliver a quality release.
I was just comparing the quality of images of Google Earth and local.live.com and I am sorry to say that Microsoft should rename it to Virtual USA. I live in Moscow and the quality of maps for this city is just terrible. I am not talking about some village
in Siberia, its Moscow (even Bill was here couple of month ago ).
Please don’t get me wrong I am a big Microsoft advocate, and I want to be able to build software using my favorite .NET language based on this technology, but for now Microsoft gives me no choice but to choose Google Earth over Virtual Earth. Guess I’d be
using my Xbox controller only for Gears of War