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New article for developers: WorldWind with the .NET Compact Framework or Managed Direct3D in Windows Mobile 5.0 May 22, 2005 [Pocket PC] | By Edward J. R. Windows Mobile 5.0 brings several new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) what means that we will see many new applications that work in Windows Mobile 5.0 but not in old Windows Mobile 2003. Here we can see one of the first such applications: cfWorldWind - WorldWind for Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC. It slowly is becoming obvious that it makes no sense nowadays to buy Windows Mobile device if it is not powered by Windows Mobile 5.0... Some Microsoft MVPs got smartphones and Pocket PCs from Microsoft with Windows Mobile 5.0 in ROM, one of them writes: Microsoft got me hooked up with a Pocket PC that had the newer OS bits I would need to start developing and then proceeds to describe a .NET application that he developed for Windows Mobile 5.0 and that should exemplify Direct3D - a 3D graphics library that now is available not just for native programs (C++) but also for managed programs (.NET: C#, Visual Basic .NET, etc): 
With Managed Direct3D making 3D applications (like games and utilities) for Windows Mobile becomes very easy and time effective... there is a thread on the WorldWind forums about why C# and DirectX was chosen for WW. plus people are bitching about why its not written in OpenGL / C++. and there are also alot of posts asking for ports to other platforms. instead of whining, i decided to just port/rewrite (the basics of) it myself. fifth, i needed a challenge. nobody was asking for it to be ported to a mobile device ... but it seemed like that would up the difficulty to get it to run on a resource constrained device. [...] the install comes with 555 megs of data! 330 megs of textures for the Earth called BlueMarbleTextures. 10 megs of boundary, and 215 megs of placename information. so that data gets you off the ground and still makes the app relatively cool without requiring an internet connection. beyond that, it gets data from a number of different servers for weather info and satellite images (including TerraServer). this ends up being mass quantities of data. i've heard them say terabytes of data for satellite imagery. and to bring down this data requires big pipes, meaning you really need a broadband connection to use it. the current Pocket PCs and US wireless networks arent great at handling transfers of large data in this manner, so i didnt plan on having the application call out to the satellite imaging servers from the beginning. instead, i decided to make this 1st release only work with the data that was provided in the install. To learn more about this application or to download source code of this application, click here.  Post your comment (free registration is required to post, but if you register you can edit your posts later) [ 6 Comments ]
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