Hey guys, I’ve been thinking about reviving Surface Globe from Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7, but the problem is that it uses SOAP protocol to view map tiles, and also 3D Models, you know like towers and stuff. I’ve been decompiling all this stuff (dnspy) and asked ChatGPT and Claude to find solutions for it, but no results :c
P.S. - it’s likely written on C#, like those Redmond guys love to use
Here’s a video by Frooxius showing how to use it
Thanks tor the video, that’s a neat application, I don’t think I’ve seen that before.
If you were going to proceed, I think your next step would be to determine whether or not the SOAP web service they used was the public VirtualEarth/Bing Maps SOAP API or their own.
The good news is that the internet archive will have WSDL definitions archived.
The bad news is that I don’t think the modern Bing Maps REST API (which has effectively been retired for Azure Maps), is all that similar.
Even with more information of the structure of all this, I’m not so confident an LLM is going to be of much help. SOAP web services were rejected by the industry at large, mostly for being too complex and therefore requiring tools to generate code to use them. (In fairness, building these services in Visual Studio was an absolute joy if the rules were followed, it was magical how it all just worked with very little effort.)
And even if you could make a proxy to translate to modern Maps services, it won’t be the same as it was, and essentially everything in that demo video can be reproduced, at higher quality, using Google Earth on your phone.