Virtual Earth 3D Map View Issue

I believe I have found the cause of this issue, or at least one that seems to make more sense. Microsoft purchased Massive Incorporated back in May of 2006, in order to leverage their virtua-advertising service so that vendors can splash their logos on the 3D surfaces. When running VE here behind our firewall and selecting 3D, there is a single consistent call to IP address starting with 38 -- which from what I understand on this wiki is an attempt to reach their Ad server(s), which is otherwise blocked by our proxy. What I don't understand is why this failed call would prevent the rendering of the 3D objects in their entirety, unless there is some contractual obligation between MS and the advertising subscribers in the works. For watching the outbound TCP calls, try TCPView, authored by Mark Russinovich -- who, if you don't know -- was also scooped up by Microsoft!

Anyway, I'm interested to know if others are seeing the same blocked IP address (or something similar) -- and if one of the MVP's can weigh in on the question about zero 3D rendering.

The massive ad server has nothing to do with downloading the 3D data. 3D will continue to render whether or not the ad server is reachable. There are actually very few ads in the world right now.

The problem has to do with the managed networking classes and how they interact with wininet. The 3D control is a managed control written in C#. It uses the managed HttpRequest classes to make network requests. By default, the managed netoworking classes copy some of the proxy settings used by wininet, but do not copy the username/password for proxy servers that require authentication.

There is a settings page where you can manually specify proxy settings. The next version will include the capability to specify user credentials for the proxy.

Most proxy servers supply a local client that will direct all network traffic properly (the ISA network client is one example). You can also have your proxy server whitelist the 3D data servers for anonymous access.

Thanks Duncan -- that's the answer I've been looking for...or at least one of them (being able to specify credentials on the WebProxy objects). Two follow up questions:

- any hint on a release timeframe for the version update

- regardless of the current massive ad server interaction with the activeX control, will the ShowImmersiveAdvertising bool be available in the VE api

I can't comment on specific release dates, but it's not far off.

I also can't really speculate on the ad revenue model, but commercial customers will certainly be able to disable any built in advertising.