Google Earth in your Windows Form

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Introduction

Almost everyone who is reading this article would have used Google Earth. So here I show how you can use it in your Windows application. It provides all the navigation functionalities of Google Earth.

Requirements

The basic requirements which should be fulfilled to use this utility are:

Google Earth Plug-in should be installed on your system (small one, takes a minute or two). When you will run this application, it will show you the link itself, so you don't need to worry about it.
Since this uses Google APIs, you should have an App key from Google (it's quite easy to get one). Get it from here.
You should have Visual Studio installed on your system.

Basic Fundamental

We have an HTML page (using JavaScript) which just displays Google Earth on it. So the basic idea is that we will add a browser control to our application and set the URL to our HTML page.

HTML Page

The HTML page uses JavaScript and is not made up of a thousand lines of code. All the work is done by Google. We just need to call certain functions so that we could have the work done.

<html>
<head>
   <title>Sample</title>
   <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key="My App key here"> </script>
   <script type="text/javascript">
      var ge;
      google.load("earth", "1");

      function init() {
         google.earth.createInstance('map3d', initCB, failureCB);
      }

      function initCB(instance) {
         ge = instance;
         ge.getWindow().setVisibility(true);

ge.getNavigationControl().setVisibility(ge.VISIBILITY_AUTO);

	 ge.getLayerRoot().enableLayerById(ge.LAYER_BORDERS, true);
  ge.getLayerRoot().enableLayerById(ge.LAYER_ROADS, true);
      }

      function failureCB(errorCode) {
      }

      google.setOnLoadCallback(init);
   </script>

</head>
<body>
   <div id="map3d" style="height: 400px; width: 600px;">
</div>
	
</body>
</html>

Please notice the first script tag. In its key attribute, you need to add your App key which you get from Google. Even I have one, but I don't feel like making it public.

Creating Windows Form

Create a Windows Forms application
To your form, add a browser control as shown below:

In the forms designer file (Form1.Designer.cs), change the URL property of your browser control to the HTML file. Also change the URI kind to absolute.

 this.webBrowser1.Url = new System.Uri(System.Environment.CurrentDirectory + "\\" + 
		"MYFiles\\MyGoogleEarthFile.html", System.UriKind.Absolute);

Set the height of your browser control to 400 and width to 600 because these are the dimensions in which our Google earth will be shown.

FINAL STEP

The final step isn't some big piece of code. So just run your application. That's it.

Do post your comments on the article, whatever way you feel about it. Thanks !!!!

History

19^th August, 2009: Initial post

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

About the Author

HiteshSharma

India

Member

I am a siebel developer by profession and a C#, ASP.Net, Javascript, C, C++ developer by Hobby. I code mostly for fun and usually code to create utilities and applications to enhance, improve and ease out my work while working on my computer. I try to make my computer a better place to code. I work on electronics as well and like to create hardware which may integrate with my computer. Now a days i code mostly for web and spend more and more of my time on javascript.

visit my blog at: http://msphitesh.blogspot.in

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