And old friend of mine, Casey Chesnut, got adventurous and looked into porting NASA's Worldwind "Virtual Earth" program to the PocketPC.  Mind you, this wasn't a trivial task, but thanks to the fact that Managed Direct3D for Mobile Devices is available now (at least in beta), and the fact that Casey is a mobile computing freak, this is a tremendous achievement!  Not to mention the fact that it was Casey's first foray into the world of Direct3D.

 

 

P.S. Interesting story about Casey (and myself)...I first met him when I was in the last leg of interviewing for a job at Valtech back in early 2001.  Casey and a friend were hosting the very first Dallas .NET Users Group meeting in Valtech's education offices, and the CTO of Valtech (Tim Snyder) encouraged me to attend.  Now, you have to keep in mind, I was a pretty hard-core Java person at this time.  I'd recently had an article on regular expressions published in the Java Developer's Journal, so I wasn't really that open-minded about "another Microsoft marketing ploy" (man, if you had told me then that in just over 2 years I'd be an evangelist working for Microsoft, I'd have stomped you flat!).  Anyway, Casey's presentation was done really well.  He touched on several good points and even did some comparisons to Java, and I was impressed!  It wasn't, however, until the tragedy of 9/11 that I got to dive deep into .NET (I was a traveling consultant and the world kind of stopped then, y'know?).  At that time, Tim asked me to do some deep investigation using the latest beta of Visual Studio.  4 weeks later (after working VERY hard at trying to prove that Java was a better choice) I was completely won over, and told Tim I never wanted to work in Java again.  The rest, as they say, is history