When I first started with Virtual Earth a few years ago I always wanted to know how to extract the altitude of buildings from the 3D control but unfortunately there wasn’t any documentation on how to create custom plug-ins. There has been numerous people on the forums over the past couple of years who have…

In the latest release of the 3D map control some new properties were added that allow you to specify where the map should appear when loading. The benefit of this is that the map will load at a specific location where as before you had to load the map and see the whole globe then…

After having such a huge positive response from many people about the Virtual Earth 3D flight simulator I built a couple of weeks ago I decided to make some enhancements to it. The enhancements were mainly focused around improved controls for a XBox controller. I have overridden the default XBox controls that are, by default,…

Update: Chck out Version 1.1 of this flight simulator here:http://rbrundritt.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E7DBA9A4BFD458C5!773.entry The Virtual Earth 3D control is a great tool when you not only want to know where some place is in the world, but also want to know what it looks like. This is particularly useful when traveling to new areas as landmarks can be…

Your class should look like this: using System;using System.IO;using System.Drawing;using System.Threading;using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.InteropServices;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Rendering3D.GraphicsProxy;using Microsoft.MapPoint.PlugIns;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Rendering3D; using Microsoft.MapPoint.Rendering3D.Steps.Actors;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Rendering3D.Atmospherics;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Binding; namespace SimpleFlightSimulator{    [Guid("67D5CFD7-9975-492d-B7AE-1B4DE757B0BD")]    public class SimpleFlightSimulatorPlugin : PlugIn    {                   }} There are three methods, Name, Activate and the Deactivate methods, that are a part of the PlugIn class which you will want to…

Another class called Airport can be made to specify an Airport location. This class will have a method called FlyToHere that will cause the plane to fly to runway of the selected airport. This class should look like this: using System;using Microsoft.MapPoint;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Rendering3D;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Rendering3D.Cameras;using Microsoft.MapPoint.Geometry.VectorMath; namespace SimpleFlightSimulator{    public class Airport    {        private LatLonAlt _latlong;        private…

You now have to create the main functionality of the plug-in. You will want to create some global Airport objects like so: private Airport lasVegas = new Airport(36.07639, -115.12571, 0, -14, 89.42);private Airport torontoPearson = new Airport(43.6738, -79.66459, 0, -14, -47.13);private Airport newyorkNewark = new Airport(40.67988, -74.17279, 0, -14, -24.56);private Airport seattleTacoma = new Airport(47.43102,…