On Monday Microsoft announced that they had added 3-D maps to their mapping service. I was curious about it so I decided to see what the fuss is about. Maybe some day I will get to see it but not today :-( So here is what my experience was like.

1. I read the press release that said that said only certain cities have 3-D maps. No surprise, Salt Lake City is not one of them. Oh, well, I can always look at Las Vegas or another city that I have been in to see what the experience would be like.

2. I go to the site and search for a hotel on the strip. I then click on the 3D icon on the floating tool bar. I am presented with a pop-up window that tells me I don't have the software installed. I think to myself didn't the press release highlight that this is better than Google earth because you don't have to go to a separate application. I continue reading and find that it is going to install an ActiveX control. I have a bad feeling about this because I don't run as administrator on my machine and therefore installing ActiveX controls or any software for that matter usually involves starting a new application. I decide to forge ahead.

3. I download and save setup.exe. I use makemeadmin to open a command prompt with administrative privileges and run setup.exe. I am shown a dialog that a file is downloading. When prompted I decide to run the .msi file. It asks me a few questions and then fails because I am not an administrator. Apparently it started in another process than the setup.exe was running under.

4. Download VirtualEarth3D.msi and save it to disk. From the command prompt with administrative privileges I run the setup. This time it all appears to work.

5. Click on the 3D icon again. Get an error that acceleration is not turned on and a pop-up help window actually on the correct topic. So far about the only thing that works like I would expect/hope it to.

6. Look at the first option that asks me to run dxdiag. Fortunately I haven't closed my command prompt so I can run it. I look and on the VMWare virtual machine that I am trying to install this on DirectDraw acceleration is turned on but Direct 3D Acceleration isn't even available as an option. I guess they haven't gotten around to virtualizing that hardware yet.

7. Give up, blog the experience, and look forward to installing it on another machine that is not a virtual machine and for which I have an administrative login.

On the whole I know I should cut Microsoft some slack since it is a beta but having to download the .msi file separately and run it seems like a problem. I know I have installed other programs that have a setup.exe that downloads something else from the Internet and they have worked correctly.

I am also hoping that somewhere down the road Microsoft might change the requirements and allow the program to run even if hardware support for 3D acceleration is not available. I realize that it will make it slow but I feel that is a better solution than locking me out of seeing the program run. I may be engaging in wishful thinking, however as Vista will start making powerful graphics cards mainstream.