I am struggling to find information about how to best create a mapping application that uses either Google Earth or Virtual Earth data *offline*.

The goal is to show countries, states, major roads, rivers, lakes and (with reason) street maps for the entire world (or at least what either Virtual Earth or Google Earth have).

I can buy a Keyhole (aka, Google Earth) Server, but I couldn’t find any information about embedding this into a .NET application. It just hosts the data internally, and you have to view it using the Keyhole applications.

The Virtual Earth WinForms SDK example looked great when used online, but I haven’t been able to find any information about licensing the Virtual Earth tiles for offline use.

I tried rendering ESRI maps on the fly, but ThinkGeo’s .NET control is painfully slow and doesn’t . Dundas’s Map control had the same problem, and Geoworks SDK didn’t work either.

So, in short, is there anyway to show street maps for the majority of the world, in a .NET application, *offline*?





Keenly waiting your expert guidance, you Microsoft zealots.

When you say "off-line", do you mean an Intranet where a server hosts the data on an internal network or say a laptop that is connected to nothing else?

Do you know what the disk storage requirements are for the Keyhole server? Could you just load that whole thing on a laptop? I'd be surprised if there's so way to integrate that with .NET applications.. ???

Eric

Hi Eric,

Yeah sorry, I should have made that clearer. By offline, I just mean no connection to the Internet, but it could be connected to an Intranet.

I'm not sure what the requirements are for Keyhole, I've sent them an email to find out.

Cheers,
Ben

Have you read this blog about the VE Map Server Appliance?

Mike, that's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen (well, today at least ). Hours of Googling and I didn't find it.... must have been some bad searching!

Thanks heaps, mate!

Wow, I thought that sounded familiar.. I must have scanned it here ( Virtual Earth Appliance ) but my memory is so bad, I guess I thought I was confusing it with the Keyhole server.

Eroc