If you’ve tried installing Virtual Earth 3D on Windows 7 you may have see a little problem with the installer crashing during setup stating, “Virtual Earth 3D Install has stopped working.” CP to the rescue! As it turns out there’s an issue with the Software Quality Metrics (SQM) in Windows 7 that it...

In the Virtual Earth AJAX control, there are certain screens that are somewhat hard to capture and control. We pride ourselves on the level of control we give our users, so here’s a little tidbit to hopefully help you retain what hair is left atop your head. I posted an entry a while back called Geocoding...

I've been getting quite a few messages about this "400: Bad Request" error people are seeing when trying to reference the Virtual Earth Web Service, more specifically when trying to fetch tokens so it's worth posting a little something on how to fix it. Specifically, the error is, " There...

So, there's an MSDN technical article posted online showing users how to authenticate and grab tokens for their Virtual Earth application - Implementing Customer Identification . Microsoft Virtual Earth authentication is required for (1) Enterprise Customers with a Virtual Earth license; (2) access to...

Microsoft Virtual Earth has a very helpful indicator window that lets you know when Bird's Eye View is available in a particular spot on the map; however, you may find the indicator annoying or a nuisance for smaller maps, so here's how you disable it. First, here's an application centered on Las Vegas...

There are certain areas of the world where Virtual Earth's imagery is, well, low resolution. Let's face it, the world is a huge place and Virtual Earth just having had it's 3rd birthday is only in the initial phases of rolling out imagery and photography to cover the world. For those of you who just...

For as long as I've worked at Microsoft I've seen this issue with a 10,000 pushpin limit in MapPoint 2002, 2004, 2006 and, yes, it still exists in 2009 . The issue is this: if you try to import more than 10,000 addresses into MapPoint you'll get the error, "Only 10000 records may be mapped at one...

It's been a day since I announced trueSpace for Virtual Earth Development and I figured I'd post a few hiccups I had to overcome while developing my ever-so-cool Random Cubes . This won't be the end all support FAQs with trueSpace (you should go to their forums for that), but just a few tidbits that...

There are a couple ways to improve performance in when using Microsoft Virtual Earth. One is to limit the number of tiles requested to the client from the control, but when do you want to do this? If you're considering limiting the number of tiles downloaded to the client, the best way is to limit the...

Inertia is that cool spinning of the globe effect in Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D. Well, it's actually turned OFF by default so you wouldn't necessarily know that inertia is available in Virtual Earth but it is. Go figure. Here's how to enable it: Ensure you have the 3D add on installed. If you don't or...

I recently got pinged about how to change the background color of the DIV element for a Virtual Earth map. Virtual Earth's CSS elements aren't documented (at least not officially), so perhaps this helps those who need/want this changed. So, the typical scenario for loading a map is to call LoadMap()...

With the imminent deprecation of Virtual Earth Versions 3, 4 and 5 (August 31, 2008) I thought it timely to point out Fiddler's useful capability for testing your applications' upgrade path to Version 6.1 (the current version). Oh, and, what a great way to remind you about the imminent deprecation and...

I was at a customer location recently and they asked me, "Why is your control so big? My performance is being hurt by having to reload this huge map control every time I load my page." Hmm, time to investigate.... I opened up Firebug in Firefox and took a quick peek at the Virtual Earth Map...

Every now and again I get pinged by someone behind a firewall or proxy server that claims they can't install Virtual Earth 3D. I have some solutions that might overcome your problems. There WERE two problems with proxies and VE3D - (1) installing over a proxy and (2) retrieving tiles over a proxy once...