Bing Maps WPF control in beta
Written by Harry Fairhead   
Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Finally there is a Bing Maps control for Windows Presentation Foundation. It's currently in beta but it opens up some interesting possibilities.

So at last WPF developers have native controls for adding maps and map-related information to their projects rather than having to use either the Ajax Bing Maps V7.0 or Silverlight control as workarounds.

What surprises me is  that there wasn't already a control for WPF given that  the Silverlight one was out eighteen months ago, released as soon as the former Virtual Earth changed its name to Bing Maps. Even more disturbingly, Chris Pendleton writing on the Bing Maps Blog starts by asking (and answering)  "What is WPF?" - as if WPF was some third world graphics system he would expect the reader never to have heard of.

However, better late than never and the blog continues:

 

"The WPF Control has everything you'd expect from a Bing Maps control including the ability to present information via a WPF native control such as:

  • Map Styles: Road, Aerial and Hybrid
  • The ability to place shapes on the map via lat/lon – pins, polylines and polygons
  • Navigating the map with pan and zoom keyboard controls

We’ve also opened up a lot of the abilities within the control to empower the developer to take control of the user experience. So, you’ll notice there is no default navigation, no default pushpins and no roll overs – this is truly a blank (er, map-based) canvas - we want to see you do some killer things with"

bingmaps


One noteworthy feature is support for Microsoft Surface - the WPF control is touch-enabled with support for Surface v 2’s Pixel Sense technology. It supports full rotation and inertia with options to turn both off and offers infinite scroll; touch to lat/lon to pixel conversions, which lets you add pushpins by touch; and the ability to plug into the Bing Maps REST API for geocoding and routing or to the Bing API for search.

This certainly gives some scope for WPF developers Bing team is looking for feedback while it is in beta.

Download:

Bing Maps WPF Control (Beta) 

Related articles:

Getting started with the Bing Maps Silverlight Control

Getting started with Bing Maps AJAX Control 7.0

 

 

If you would like to be informed about new articles on I Programmer you can either follow us on Twitter or Facebook or you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Banner


Run WebAssembly Components Inside Node.js With Jco
28/03/2024

Jco 1.0 has been just announced by the Bytecode Alliance.It's a native JavaScript WebAssembly toolchain and runtime that runs Wasm components inside Node.js. Why is that useful?



We Built A Software Engineer
20/03/2024

One of the most worrying things about being a programmer today is the threat from AI. It has gone so far that NVIDA CEO Jensen Huang proclaims that you really shouldn't start training as a programmer  [ ... ]


More News

Last Updated ( Thursday, 25 August 2011 )