StevieG's Car PC Blog

In my previous post I had a few problems getting the ActiveX/COM object available to use from within Visual Studio. Thankfully, it turned out it wasn’t just me, but anyone using the European version of the product.

Installing the North American version of the software alongside the European version, however, did the trick. Using Windows 7 beta (and therefore, probably Vista and XP) the control now shows up perfectly in Visual Studio 2008.

The good news ends there – Microsoft have not made any of the new features available in the desktop version of Mappoint 2009 available programmatically – which effectively means that this is basically a Map update to any application developed on Mappoint 2004, and nothing more.

This means I won’t be using it . but if you’re interested, I’ve constructed the class diagram using VS2008 to show all the available classes, properties, methods etc. (click to view full size)

Just been looking at using Mappoint (again!) for the back end location system. Some good improvements have been made in this version in comparison to the previous version I’ve got (2004) – a major improvement is that it now supports 3D-mapping (ala TomTom) although it remains to be seen whether it can be used when used inside another program.

So far it’s only bad news. The latest version of MapPoint still doesn’t appear to be available as a .Net component – just an old style COM object.

Not only that, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to try out any of it’s functionality, because the European version doesn’t appear to have the COM component properly included in the distribution. After initially thinking it might be a Windows 7 + Visual Studio 2008 problem further research indicates that it’s actually MapPoint 2009 Europe itself.

Next step is to get hold of Mappoint 2009 North American version (thankfully free for me via MSDNAA) and see if installing that fixes the problem. If it does, then I’ll soon see if the COM object exposes all the new, wonderful 3D mapping features. However, given the dire documentation which doesn’t appear to have been updated since Mappoint 2004 I won’t hold my breath!