Virtual Earth 3D team blog

How to Make Virtual Earth 3D Live Forever

Hello all, When we announced that we're "discontinuing investment" in VE3D earlier this year, many...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 08/13/2011

Discontinuing Investment is Such Sweet Sorrow

Hello all, We have just announced that we will be discontinuing investment in VE3D. In the short...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 11/03/2010

Bing Maps 3D fix for Firefox 3.6 released

With the 3.6 release Firefox changed the plugin API which broke Virtual Earth 3D temporarily. To...

Author: Kristoffer Date: 03/29/2010

Custom Clouds

It is possible (and pretty easy) to add your own weather data (based on your own data sources, or...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 01/24/2010

New version of InfoStrat.VE: VE3D in WPF

Goodness for the new year: Have you seen the Microsoft Surface Globe application in the Microsoft...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 01/05/2010

Two good questions

Posting some answers to questions I've gotten recently. Bug in the samples: Kind of silly that I...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 12/08/2009

Installing VE3D without the setup package

In some scenarios it may be desirable to install the VE3D engine without visiting the...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 09/27/2009

Hosting VE3D in native code

Sorry for the glut of posts this week. I hadn't been able to write much, but there were still...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 09/24/2009

GraphicsProxy RenderState

I've gotten a few questions lately about how to do some alpha effects using models, specifically...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 09/22/2009

X File bulk display

I was asked the other day about how to load multiple x file -based models into VE3D without having...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 09/20/2009

Constraining camera movement

Just got a good question: what if I want to prevent the camera from moving outside certain bounds,...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 08/07/2009

Actor data source questions

I just fielded a few good questions via email about actor data sources, and thought it would make a...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 07/26/2009

Bing Maps 3D

As you may be aware, the website changed names to Bing Maps: https://www.bing.com/maps/. The 3D view...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 06/14/2009

Data Format update and reminder

You may recall that I posted about a data format change for the new version. The final switch-over...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 06/09/2009

WMS Data

I was having a discussion with Kurt Guenther from Infusion yesterday on the topic of WMS servers and...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 06/09/2009

Modifying cache location

My, it has been a long time since I posted. I promise I will try to be better. Recently I was asked...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 06/09/2009

Manual Rendering

Folks have really reacted to my mention of manual rendering, so I've made a sample for it. Good...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/19/2009

Anisotropic Filtering

Anisotropic has been a bit of a frustration for us because while it is very easy to do (it's really...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/19/2009

New Version Released!

Our new version has gone live. Head on over to maps.live.com and click "3D" to upgrade. This release...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/09/2009

Data Format Revision

As part of our version update, we are also updating the file format of our 3D buildings. The upside...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/06/2009

Logging

At times it can be useful to know when and if errors are occurring in VE3D. When instructed, VE3D...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/05/2009

Upcoming new version

Next week we'll be releasing a new version of the control. The focus of the release is on perf and...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/01/2009

WPF and VE3D

I do love having a developer community out there. We've had lots of requests for direct WPF...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 03/11/2009

Multitouch in VE3D

Ever since I got a Touchsmart at home I've been very interested in the desktop touch experience, and...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 03/04/2009

Server transition

Hello all, I've had a few emails regarding our files being down this weekend. Sorry I didn't give a...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 03/01/2009

Startup and Host interaction

When the control first starts, there are several stages that need to complete before it is really...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 02/21/2009

Microsoft Photo Calibration Tool

Siddharth Jain, one of the devs on our team, wrote a tool using VE3D to place photos in 3D and save...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 02/11/2009

Documentation!

Due to the outstanding efforts of our team's tech writer, we've produced some lovely help...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 01/25/2009

Camera Tricks

Just a couple camera nuggets to drop today. The code snippets below were all written inside...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 01/14/2009

Busy busy busy...

I haven't posted in quite awhile, as development on the next version has been pretty intense....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 01/11/2009

Information Pop-ups in WinForms

We've had several questions about how to do a pop-up form in WinForms, similar to the one on the...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 11/24/2008

VE3D on a Mac

Parallels, which is a program that allows running Windows software on a Mac, has recently released...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 11/23/2008

Animated Textures

In addition to using dynamic buffers to animate geometry, you can also animate the textures on...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 11/18/2008

Debug Key Shortcuts

There are a few settings in VE3D that you can use for debugging that are turned off by default, but...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 10/29/2008

Actors and DataSources

In this sample, we create a DataSource, which is a class that can be used for large-scale data sets....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 10/27/2008

Camera Control

In this sample, we create a plug-in to move the camera to a random location in the world every time...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 10/22/2008

Terrain Imagery Overlays

There are four ways to add custom imagery to VE3D. The first three involve using built-in classes,...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 10/12/2008

Controlling Time

Today we show a little of the "Time" sample. It demonstrates how to use the concepts of rendering...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 10/05/2008

Current Samples

Here's the newest, most whiz-bang sample set we've got right at the moment. Download The Samples!...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 09/25/2008

New Version of VE3D

You may have noticed that we have not blogged recently, and that’s because we’ve been hard at work...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 09/25/2008

Animation

Note: this entry references code for an older version of VE3D. The newest code samples are here....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 07/08/2008

New Intellisense Files

Note: this entry references code for an older version of VE3D. The newest code samples are here....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 07/08/2008

Loading a model into VE3D

Note: this entry references code for an older version of VE3D. The newest code samples are here....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 05/27/2008

Installing Plug-Ins

Note: this entry references code for an older version of VE3D. The newest code samples are here....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 05/01/2008

Creating the most basic Windows Form

Note: this entry references code for an older version of VE3D. The newest code samples are here. The...

Author: Heptazane Date: 04/19/2008

Geometry

The first thing that most people want to do when playing with the 3D control is add some stuff to...

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/18/2008

Adding a Virtual Earth 3D Plug-in to your webpage

Note: this entry references code for an older version of VE3D. The newest code samples are here....

Author: NikolaiF Date: 04/11/2008