Microsoft Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D 6.1 Released

April 11th, 2008 · 13 Comments · GIS

Steve Lombardi and Chris Pendleton have both blogged about the new release of Microsoft Virtual Earth (and Live Maps). Steve sums it up:

This ended up being a much bigger release than originally planned including three full sprints of development. As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the dozens of improvements across the application tiers including Geocoding enhancements, browser compatibility (Safari and IE8), parsing improvements, reverse geocoding, printing improvements and tons more. We are also releasing an upgrade of our Map Control to version 6.1 for developers.

For developers there are some enhancements that will be very welcomed. Johannes Kebeck looks at more detail at some of the new API features. I’m very interested in Safari support and better printing. We had a project use Google Maps because of poor Safari browser support (which was a key requirement).

I still can’t understand why Microsoft continues to put Virtual Earth under the “Live” banner. Live Search is the worst search product out there and having that stigma attached to what might very well be the best web mapping application around only limits its potential.

Now if they could only get the players to animate, I could watch a baseball game in VE3D.

Tags: Microsoft·Virtual Earth

13 responses so far ↓

1 yodel // Apr 11, 2008 at 10:19 am

James,

Does your office building look better yet?
2 James Fee // Apr 11, 2008 at 10:22 am

No, they seem to have stuck to large cities. Tempe is still the same as before.
3 Cellulose // Apr 11, 2008 at 10:43 am

Maybe I just don’t understand the game… but even when baseball watch live on TV, it still doesn’t look “animated”.
4 James Fee // Apr 11, 2008 at 10:53 am

@Cellulose You want to step outside? Baseball is the greatest game ever invented. Plus my Giants have won 3 in a row. Time to start making plans for October I guess.
5 Tim Maddle // Apr 11, 2008 at 6:07 pm

What the VE API really needs to put it over the top is the ability to add overlays that are requested as a single image the size of the map pane instead of several image tiles. That would make it much more user-friendly to products such as AGS without requiring tiling. I am no fan of tiling because of the insane number of images that can build up for several layers covering a fairly wide geographic area.
6 Brian Johnson // Apr 11, 2008 at 7:47 pm

Anyone else have problems with the new VE3D?

We’ve got two new machines at work - Dell Precision T5400s - 2GB RAM with NVidia 256MB video. One machine reboots (without a blue screen) when the second stage of the download starts) and the other crashed with a blue screen after flying around for a minute or two.

The machine that crashed when installing had been loaded up - ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, AutoCAD, etc. The other machine was a fresh Windows XP install, without any programs installed yet.

Any idea who to send the bug report to at Microsoft?

James - an aside…I couldn’t find the post button! I had to use the IE Developer’s Toolbar to find the ‘Submit’ button and get it to appear! Maybe my 1024×768 screen can’t handle your redesign. Time to spring for that LCD monitor, I guess!
7 ChrisW // Apr 12, 2008 at 2:11 am

Cellulose: Maybe I just don’t understand the game… but even when ! watch baseball live on TV, it still doesn’t look “animated”.

You should try cricket, a game where a match can last for days, where players stop for meal breaks, and at the end of it all only a forensic accountant can tell you who won. I’m a Brit, but give me baseball any day!
8 Dave Smith // Apr 12, 2008 at 4:51 pm

@Tim Maddle: you can do that already - In JS, just grab the VE view extents and create a WMS (or other) request from it. Takes a little hackery to insert it into the VE DOM, but performs quite serviceably.
Not to mention, if you are using AGS now, you will like what’s coming down the pike for VE in 9.3 quite a bit…
9 Tim Maddle // Apr 13, 2008 at 11:06 am

@Dave,
I tried that but dropped it because I lost the ability to use VE’s built in panning because the overlay div is sitting on top of the map pane. I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to take a drag & drop component from a javascript library, attach it to the overlay image, then recenter the VEMap control as the overlay is dragged. Still, it would be nice if MS officially added the capability to VE.
10 Joe Plattner // Apr 15, 2008 at 10:16 am

I am having the same problem as Mr. Johnson regarding the install. It’s driving me nuts. I get a total reboot. No error mesage no nothing. The computer just shuts down a few minutes into the install process.

I also have ArcGIS installed. I removed VE, and tried the install again, but I got the same problem. We are using XP.
11 Brian Johnson // Apr 16, 2008 at 9:03 am

Hopefully this isn’t duplicated….I can’t get it to post properly…
@Joe - Whew! I’m not crazy!

I did manage to get VE3D working at home on a Dell GX280 with a ATI Radeon X300 video card. Software insalled on the machine was pretty much the same.

Sorry for the diversion (thought I’d get this indexed in Google for others to find), but another issue with the Dell Precision T5400/NVIDIA NVS290 video card setup is the Table of Contents in ArcMap randomly not showing symbology. The symbols sometimes show up, and other times they are just missing. ESRI pointed me to KB32737 which indicates the problem is my Microsoft mouse driver.

Instead - a coworker pointed out the AdvancedArcMapSettings.exe Data Frame/TOC refresh rate setting - lowering this value fixed that problem.
12 Charlie // Apr 21, 2008 at 1:46 pm

I’m not a developer, programmer or “expert” of any sort and I’m not sure if this is the right forum to raise my question but, if not, perhaps some kind soul could give me directions?

I’d like to be able to print from Microsoft’s 3D images (our local Church for example as a farewell gift for our retiring Priest). Ideally I would take the closest image that looks good on my monitor and import it into Photoshop.
The Print function on the screen gives me very poor images (and vertically elongated) direct to my printer. The best I’ve managed so far is to “print screen” and paste that into Photoshop but the quality is still well short of what I see on my monitor.
Any help/advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks
13 Tim Maddle // Apr 21, 2008 at 4:19 pm

Charlie,
You could try Snag It, a screen capture software.