Hello all, We have just announced that we will be discontinuing investment in VE3D . In the short term, the 3D view will be removed from bing.com/maps. The 3D control itself will continue to function, and data will continue to be served to it. The support will continue until December 2011, and during...

I've gotten a few questions lately about how to do some alpha effects using models, specifically MeshGraphicsObject. After you create the GraphicsObject, it has a RenderState object available on it. The fields on this object will be familiar to those experienced with DirectX, but here's a rundown of...

I just fielded a few good questions via email about actor data sources, and thought it would make a good post. Actor data sources are a way of getting little bits of your code (actors) into the world, handing spatial indexing and cache management for you. When each actor is in view, they are given...

You may recall that I posted about a data format change for the new version. The final switch-over is going to happen July 9th. If you are still using an old version, models will stop displaying. So upgrade now, the new version is better anyway. For those already on the new version (assembly version...

I was having a discussion with Kurt Guenther from Infusion yesterday on the topic of WMS servers and VE3D. There is a large amount of very interesting spatial data out there served by Web Map Services , or WMS servers. VE3D is able to process this data using ConnectionParameter-based DataSources. Setting...

My, it has been a long time since I posted. I promise I will try to be better. Recently I was asked if it is possible to change the location of the cache file. It is, with certain minor restrictions. You can change the location by adding this to user.config: <setting name="PersistentCacheDirectory...

Our new version has gone live. Head on over to maps.live.com and click "3D" to upgrade. This release is billed primarily as a perf and bug release because it doesn't add a lot of new features at the end-user level (though I think you will be pleased with the perf improvements), but we did have time to...

Next week we'll be releasing a new version of the control. The focus of the release is on perf and bug fixes, but it also adds a set of interesting new functions for managed code developers. I'll be posting updated samples, and more detail on the changes, when the control goes public. But will it...

I do love having a developer community out there. We've had lots of requests for direct WPF integration of VE3D, and we've certainly wanted to make it part of the story... and then someone else just goes and does it. Marc Schweigert called this to me attention yesterday. Infostrat has taken VE3D and...

Ever since I got a Touchsmart at home I've been very interested in the desktop touch experience, and so in the last couple days I decided to play with how I could incorporate it into VE3D. The code itself isn't really ready for consumption, but if you'd like to see where I'm at, I've built a very preliminary...

When the control first starts, there are several stages that need to complete before it is really ready. 1 Construction. This occurs when you call GlobeControl's constructor. 2 Initialization on the UI thread. Some objects can initialize themselves here. This happens when the control starts receiving...

Siddharth Jain, one of the devs on our team, wrote a tool using VE3D to place photos in 3D and save this information as a tag in the file itself. In short, you open a picture in the program, fly to roughly where the picture was taken from, click on points in the world and in the photo that you know are...

Due to the outstanding efforts of our team's tech writer, we've produced some lovely help documentation and are able to share it with you, the intrepid VE3D dev community. Why intrepid? Well, at least some of you coded for some time and did some impressive work without even the intellisense files! Even...

I haven't posted in quite awhile, as development on the next version has been pretty intense. However, we are still monitoring the blog feedback and comments, so don't feel as if VE3D or the blog is being neglected. When I have time I will be getting back to writing. Happy New Year! Oh, one thing...

We've had several questions about how to do a pop-up form in WinForms, similar to the one on the website. The website pop-up is implemented entirely within the browser, using an IFrame. Therefore, the functionality does not exist by default in the managed code alone. However, the events you need are...

Parallels, which is a program that allows running Windows software on a Mac, has recently released version 4, which has support for DirectX 9.0. This means that Mac users can now see VE3D in all its glory. Well, most of it anyway. I don't have a Mac in my office to test with, but it kind of sounds from...

In addition to using dynamic buffers to animate geometry, you can also animate the textures on geometry. This is accomplished by using BitmapProvider. A BitmapProvider at its simplest is just a wrapper for a Bitmap, which can be used as the icon for a pushpin or the data for a texture that should be...

This sample was released before , but didn't have a version that could run on the web without an install. The new version in the samples pack is almost exactly the same, so I won't go over it again in detail. This post is just to show it off interactively. See it in action! When the page...

There are a few settings in VE3D that you can use for debugging that are turned off by default, but (for a dev anyway) are very easy to turn back on again. All you need is this file . Drop it into VE3D's settings directory, which is at this location: (Vista) C:\Users\{username}\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft...

In this sample, we create a DataSource, which is a class that can be used for large-scale data sets. It provides hooks into the system's spatial index, memory cache, and background data threads. Data from the DataSource will only be requested when it is in view, and will be automatically cached according...

In this sample, we create a plug-in to move the camera to a random location in the world every time a HTML button is pressed. It demonstrates basic plug-in loading, writing and using a CameraController, and communicating between a plug-in and the hosting web page via Events. See it in action. Camera...

There are four ways to add custom imagery to VE3D. The first three involve using built-in classes, and you just have to provide information on where to get the data. The fourth involves implementing your own DataSource. See it in action! This sample demonstrates how to add common terrain imagery...