New Version of VE3D
You may have noticed that we have not blogged recently, and that’s because we’ve been hard at work on the next version of Virtual Earth 3D. The new version features some rendering improvements for the general user, but the most exciting part is for devs (well, that's what we think, but we ARE devs). We have enabled partial trust plug-ins, which means you can put your plug-in on the web, create a page that references it, and users can go see it without having to install anything more than the basic VE3D control.
Behind the scenes, we load your plug-in’s dll to the client and execute it with a limited set of permissions. For example, the plug-in cannot access the file system on its own, but you can still do custom rendering and control like you could before. We’ve updated all the samples you’ve seen so far to run like this, except for the x file loader and the shortcut key (which was an example of how to install one, and is still a valid scenario in some cases). We’ve also added a few new samples to show some new functionality and demonstrate some stuff that’s been there for awhile but we hadn’t gotten a chance to show yet.
Existing code built against VE3D will need to be recompiled, and in some cases we’ve moved a few properties around. The samples should cover most of these changes, but please comment or send us feedback on items that you have trouble with.