Today was my last day at Microsoft.  Monday I start as a contractor working for Lockheed Martin on their Prepar3d program.  Hopefully I can also find some time soon to finish up the managed SimConnect client.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

Well, not exactly.  I missed the press release back in May, but Lockheed Martin has finally announced their Prepar3d product, based on the ESP code they licensed from Microsoft.  See the Lockheed Martin Press Release for more information.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

Or at least our websites are.  The websites www.microsoft.com/esp and www.msdn.com/esp have been end of lifed.  The SDK docs available on the ESP MSDN library page are still available.  This page also archives some of our whitepapers and sample code links.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

Flight1 Aviation Technologies today announced they have acquired a license to the ESP v1 Object Code (just the run-time, no source code).  See their Press Release and their VisPro product page for more information.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

This one from networkworld.com, mentions the Pilatus PC-12 desktop trainer that will be one of Lockheed’s first solutions using the ESP technology.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

Today, Lockheed Martin announced it has licensed Microsoft’s ESP platform to build new simulation solutions.  This is part of what I’ve been doing the last 9 months since the ACES studio shut down, working with the team that handled the licensing deal.

See the Microsoft PressPass Press Release and this TechFlash blog post for more info.  I’ll post more links as I come across them.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

Beta 3 is now available for download here:

http://beatlescloudstorage.blob.core.windows.net/downloads/BeatlesBlog.SimConnect.SDK.Beta3.zip

Fixes/Changes since Beta 2

• Fixed malformed overload of RequestDataOnSimObjectType when using a data object instance
• Empty fixed length strings weren’t being parsed correctly
• Silverlight version of library had some multi-threading issues

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

I know what some of you are thinking, shouldn’t there be an ‘s’ on the end of that title – well, in this case, no, since I’m not referring to the white fluffy things in the sky, instead I’m referring to the Windows Azure cloud environment :->.  Specifically I’m referring to my new Silverlight SimConnect client showcase site hosted on Windows Azure, available here:

http://beatlesblog.cloudapp.net

See the home page for instructions on setting up your FSX or ESP environment to allow connections from a Silverlight SimConnect Client.  The site also has download links for the latest release of my new Managed SimConnect SDK (Beta 2 at present) and the needed Silverlight Policy File Server program.

The site currently has these 3 applications available:

• BBDashboard – this shows 4 simple “gauges” in a 2×2 grid
• BBMovingMap – this one shows the user aircraft and AI Object locations on a Virtual Earth map control, including track lines
• BBTrax – currently this one allows connecting to multiple FSX/ESP instances and dsiplaying them on a Virtual Earth map control.  Eventually I plan to enhance this program to support uploading your position data to cloud storage, and download others position information from cloud storage, making for a FlightAware style display, but I have to finish learning WCF first :->

See ya in the cloud, and the clouds.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson

Hey All,

I’ve just posted a new Beta 2 release of the Managed SimConnect SDK, here’s the link:

BeatlesBlog.SimConnect.SDK.Beta2.zip

Fixes/Changes since Beta 1

• IsLocalRunning() function would fault on any machine that hadn’t also ran ESP v1 at least once (sorry about that :->)
• Returned data that contained a dwoutof or dwArrayCount value wasn’t being handled correctly when there was no data, resulting in an array out of bounds error
• Fixed the code that receives Facility data to correctly allocate the SIMCONNECT_DATA_FACILITY_Xxx objects within the returned array
• Added additional sanity checks to data parsing functions to handle “shortened” return structures
• Limited the API functions that take a data instance to only allow class based objects (struct based objects get passed by value, which doesn’t work here)
• Changed the void return type on most of the API functions to be an Int32.  The return value is the PacketID of the packet sent for this API call

So, click on the link above and get the latest code.  Any questions/comments/bug reports/etc, drop me a line in the SimConnect Forum on FSDeveloper.com.

Tim “Beatle” Gregson