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Exploring, then removing, Bird's Eye imagery
by Jeff 
One of the real differentiating features of Virtual Earth over competitors is the oblique or ‘Bird’s Eye’ imagery. It provides a really incredible view of the world. Heck, looking at my house, I can see my car clearly in the driveway. Here’s an example of the view of the Microsoft campus.
Follow up:
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s licensing agreement with Pictometry, the supplier of the Bird’s Eye imagery doesn’t permit government entities to use it without establishing their own license with the company. Since many agencies don’t want to do that, developers sometimes need a way to disable that imagery.
Until version 6.1, there wasn’t a way to do so within the API, and we often had to resort to CSS hacks to disable the ‘Bird’s Eye’ button on the control panel, and trap for the keystrokes that activate it. However, now we do have a way to turn it off programmatically, and it’s pretty easy. Just set the EnableBirdseye property to true on the VEMapOptions class when you initialize the map:
var options = new VEMapOptions();
options.EnableBirdseye = false;
map = new VEMap('myMap');
map.LoadMap( new VELatLong(47.6, -122.33), 10, 'h', false,
VEMapMode.Mode2D, true, 0, options );
And that’s about it. It’s pretty simple.
But if you don’t have a licensing reason to disable Bird’s Eye, why would you? It’s pretty darn cool. Well, one common complaint is the little popup that appears and offers “See this location in bird’s eye view”. It’s great to know that it is available, but for a commercial application or a demonstration, it kind of gets in the way. So you might think about turning it off to avoid the popup, but you don’t want to lose the functionality. What can you do?
Time for more CSS trickery. That little popup is represented inside the Virtual Earth control source code by a CSS style named MSVE_obliqueNotification. So all we have to do is disable that by including this in the <head> of our html:
<style type="text/css">
#MSVE_obliqueNotification { visibility: hidden; }
</style>
And Bob’s your uncle...or something like that.
But how does it know to say “See this location in bird’s eye view”? For that we can look to the IsBirdseyeAvailable method on the VEMap object. It will return true if there is oblique imagery available and if you’re already at zoom level 11 or better. Oh, it will also return false if you have used the EnableBirdseye = false technique above. This is handy if you’re writing your own map ‘dashboard’ to replace the default one.
And there you have it. If you haven’t yet had a chance to play around with Bird’s Eye, you should head on over maps.live.com and give it a try.
10/09/08 11:39:46 pm,