Bing Maps Blog

Another Bing Maps Government Solution: Microsoft Single View Platform

Bing Maps Blog — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

In today’s hectic and digital world, workers are overloaded by information management. The Microsoft Single View Platform (SVP) helps decision makers take action quicker on information that is relevant and often time sensitive by simplifying complex data and information into an easy-to-use system for all types of government workers and roles. Using a broad suite of Microsoft products, this solution is easy to implement and cost-effective, and will fit nicely into the software investments many government agencies already license today.

With so much data having a location component, Microsoft Bing Maps adds the critical visualization layer to SVP resulting in increased situational awareness for employees and more informed decision making and reporting. With Single View Platform, workers can easily see the information that matters to them in a simple-to-consume visual way.

To learn more, read case studies, and watch demos, visit Microsoft Single View Platform.

Super Imagery for Super Bowl 2012!

Bing Maps Blog — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

If you love football (or great commercials…or parties with lots of snacks), you’re probably looking forward to Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis, Indiana happening this Sunday. If you’re taking a trip to Indiana to see the big game in person, or if you’re planning to experience it all from the comfort of your couch, let Bing Maps be your insider’s guide. Our incredible aerial imagery and Bird’s Eye perspective allow you to enjoy unique, beautiful, and interactive pictures of Lucas Oil Stadium and all the best sights and attractions that make Indianapolis “the crossroads of America!” Check it out!

The Main Event

On February 5, all eyes will be on Lucas Oil Stadium, where ticketholders will be soaking in the exciting atmosphere during the game. The stadium, which opened in 2008, boasts the largest retractable roof in the NFL, covers 1.8 million square feet, and was named the 2009 Sports Facility of the Year by Street and Smith’s Sports Business Journal. You can read more about the stadium here.

Also, check out these before and after aerial images of the construction process. Big improvement, don’t you think?

January 27 – February 5, visitors can enjoy the NFL Experience—an interactive theme park all about pro football—hosted at the Indiana Convention Center. Between the NFL Experience and Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Georgia Street will be transformed into Super Bowl Village (a.k.a. “The Epicenter of Awesome”). These three blocks will be packed with interactive games, restaurants, bars, concerts, live attractions, and four ziplines overhead! Learn more at www.indianapolissuperbowl.com.

Georgia Street, Bird's Eye perspective

New in Town?

Bing Maps offers helpful tools and information for visitors to Indianapolis, and also for those who simply want to know more about the city.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art holds a collection of over 50,000 pieces of art spanning 5,000 years and representing the whole world.

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Aerial view

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Bird's Eye perspective

It sits adjacent to the breathtaking 100 Acres Art and Nature Park. Best of all, the museum is FREE!

For those more interested in fashion than football, check out the Material World Exhibit, featuring “the extravagant ornamentation of textiles and personal adornment from cultures around the world, highlighting the significance of textiles in displaying wealth, status, and power.” This exhibit is open through Sunday, February 5.

Perhaps the city’s most infamous attraction, don’t miss the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500. This incredible facility is offering special hours of operation during Super Bowl XLVI for tours, boasting one of the most highly visible collections in the world devoted to automobiles and auto racing. More information is available here. Enjoy several tour options of the famous 2.5 mile oval in person, or check out this image:

Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Bird's Eye perspective

Traveling with kids? The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is a must-see. Come explore all five floors of the largest Children’s Museum in the WORLD! Yes…the whole world. Exhibits cover science, culture, history, and the arts…and there are some frighteningly realistic dinosaurs that look like they’re roaming the grounds, looking for fun!

Children's Museum, Aerial view

Children's Museum, Bird's Eye view

If you haven’t had enough museums, you’re in luck…there are MORE! Three of Indiana’s best are all lined up in a row, for your viewing pleasure. In one visit (or click of the mouse, for those following along at home!), you can see the Indiana State Museum, the NCAA Hall of Champions, and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art.

Three Museums, Bird's Eye

For many of you, a day of shopping will ALWAYS sound more fun than a day of football. The Cultural Trail of Indianapolis is a walking/biking trails that connects all five of the downtown Cultural Districts in the city, including Fountain Square, Indiana Avenue, Mass Avenue, The Canal and White River State Park, and the Wholesale District. Each district offers fun shops, great restaurants, and lovely galleries to explore.

Find more info here: http://www.indyculturaltrail.org/

The Cultural Trail, Bird's Eye view

The Canal Walk, Bird's Eye

For those history buffs, check out the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument.

This towering structure is hard to miss, and is situated very close to Super Bowl Village. At 284 feet tall, the monument stands in memory of the thousands of Indianapolis residents who lost their lives in the Civil War. Visitors can see the city from the glass-enclosed observatory up top, or check out the historical displays about the Civil War in the basement.

If you want to brave the winter cold, the White River State Park and Indianapolis Zoo are excellent destinations. Located downtown, White River was one of the first state parks in Indiana. Check out the zoo, three museums, and an IMAX theater, all with a great view of the city skyline.

White River State Park from the air

Finally, if you’re wandering the city and looking for a quick and delicious snack, drop in at the Indianapolis City Market. This has been Indianapolis’ go-to place for fresh produce, specialty foods, delicious baked goods, and fine meats and cheeses from around the world since 1886. It’s also a great spot to relax and enjoy the sights, smells, and lively atmosphere of the city.

Indianapolis City Market, Streetside view

Need a map? We love maps…so here’s a helpful collection of maps to help you navigate all the local events: Know Before You Go.

We hope you’ll enjoy touring the city (live, or virtually) as much as we have. Continue using Bing Maps for all your travel needs, Super Bowl related or otherwise!

Bing Maps Reporting Tips

Bing Maps Blog — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

By Ricky Brundritt, EMEA Bing Maps Technology Solution Professional

In addition to Bing Maps great API’s, there are some helpful reporting tools available to anyone who has a Bing Maps account: Developer or Enterprise. These help you get insight as to how people are using your map applications, and to also keep track of your Bing Maps usage so that it does not exceed your allowed transactions. For example, according to the Bing Maps Terms of Use, Limited Commercial use accounts are allowed 500,000 transactions and 125,000 sessions within a 12-month period.

This post will go through and highlight many useful tips to help you make the most out your Bing Maps sessions and transactions. This post is in two sections. The first section is about the reporting tools available in the Bing Maps portal and the second is focused on development tips to get the most out of the API. This blog post will assume that you have implemented Bing Maps Keys in your application. If you are using Bing Maps Tokens, these will be retired on March 30^th, 2012. Documentation on how to migrate to Bing Maps Keys is here.

Before I move forward, there are a couple of definitions you should know.

Bing Maps Session: A Bing Maps session occurs when one of the map controls is loaded. Any transactions occurred against the Bing Maps services, while within a session is non-billable. Note this requires the application to properly use Bing Maps Keys.
Bing Maps Transaction: A Bing Maps transaction occurs any time a service request is made. For example, some of the more common services used that incur transactions are: Bing Maps Geocoding, Routing, and Imagery service, Bing Spatial Data Service Query .
Bing Maps Key: A Bing Maps Key is a unique string that is used to authenticate a user’s Bing Maps application or service request. This is the primary method used for tracking usage of the Bing Maps API’s.

Complete documentation explaining all the different ways sessions and transactions are incurred can be found here.

Bing Maps Portal Reports

The Bing Maps reporting tools can be found in the Bing Maps portal. To find the reports follow these steps:

1. Sign into the Bing Maps portal (https://www.bingmapsportal.com/) using your Windows Live Id for your account.

2. Once signed in click on the “View my Bing Maps API usage” link in the left side panel.

3. You will now see a list of 5 different report options. Choose the one that interests you.

a. Usage Report – A report of all transactions incurred using Bing Maps keys

b. Usage Report by Category – A breakdown of all transactions broken up by the different usage categories (i.e. AjaxSession, RESTRoutes). This is a great way to see how users are using Bing Maps in your application.

c. Usage Report by Bing Maps Keys – Breaks down the transaction by Bing Maps keys. This is useful if you have multiple applications each using a different Bing Maps key.

d. Legacy (MWS + Token) Usage Report – This is an older report type that let people who have implemented Bing Maps tokens or who used to use MapPoint Web Services view their historical transactions.

e. Legacy (MWS + Token) Usage Report by Category - This is a break down of the historical transactions incurred by MapPoint and Bing Maps token users.

If you were to select Usage Report by Category, you would see a page open that looks like this:

All reports have date range filters which can be used to view up to one year’s worth of data. You can also filter the first two reports by Bing Maps key to further break down the data. In addition you can export the reports to several file formats:

XML file with report data
CSV (comma delimited)
Acrobat (PDF) file
MHTML (web archive)
Excel
TIFF file
Word

Development Tips

Many of the Bing Maps API’s have a method for getting the credentials from the map after you have loaded it using a valid Bing Maps key. One often overlooked feature is that, by getting the credentials from the map, you do not get back your original Bing Maps key. Instead, you get a special session key which you can use as a Bing Maps key to make requests to the Bing Maps services. By doing this, all transactions occurred by this session key will be non-billable. Many developers overlook this feature and opt to simply use their original Bing Maps key, not knowing that they are actually incurring more billable transactions than they need to. Here are some examples of how to properly use a session key.

Bing Maps V7 AJAX API

function ClickGeocode()

{

map.getCredentials(MakeBingMapsRESTRequest);

}

function MakeBingMapsRESTRequest(sessionKey)

{

//Generate a request URL for the Bing Maps REST services.

//Use the session key in the request as the Bing Maps key

}

Full working sample can be found here.

Bing Maps Silverlight, WPF, WP7, and WinForm API’s

Map.CredentialsProvider.GetCredentials((c) =>

{

string sessionKey = c.ApplicationId;

//Generate a request URL for the Bing Maps REST services.

//Use the session key in the request as the Bing Maps key

});

Full working samples can be found here.

Throttled Events for Dynamically Loading Data

Some developers like to update the data on the map as it moves. This is often achieved by using a view change end map event. This can be useful for presenting new data to the user without them needing to do a new search. However there are a few tricks you can implement to reduce the number of requests made by your application. The first trick, if using the Bing Maps V7 API, is to use a throttled event. This will help reduce the number of events that are fired if the user is constantly panning and zooming the map. Here is an example of how to create a throttled event in Bing Maps V7 that ensures that 250ms has passed since the map has stopped moving.

Microsoft.Maps.Events.addThrottledHandler(map, 'viewchangeend', eventHandlerFunction, 250);

By reducing the number of requests made to the Bing Maps services, you greatly reduce the amount of bandwidth required by your application which will in turn increase performance. This will be most notable on web and mobile applications. You can find a good working example of this type of solution here.

Learn More

To learn more about the Bing Maps Account Center and reporting capabilities, attend a webcast on March 15. Register here.

Four New Bing Maps V7 Modules

Bing Maps Blog — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

By Ricky Brundritt, EMEA Bing Maps Technology Solution Professional

In September of 2011 we started the Bing Maps v7 Module CodePlex Project. The purpose of this project is to create a single place where developers can find and share useful modules that expand the functionality of the Bing Maps V7 API. Currently, there have been 10 modules submitted to the project. With a number of new modules in development, it’s safe to say that this project is definitely worth looking into. Today I would like to highlight the four newest modules added to this project.

Point Based Clustering Module

Download here

I created this module based on feedback received around the Client Side Clustering Module that I created some time ago. The older client side clustering module uses a grid based algorithm which is fast, but requires re-clustering the data every time the map moved. This allows for 5000+ pushpins to be clustered in a fraction of a second but often results in pushpins jumping around the map as you pan. The point based algorithm prevents pushpins from overlapping and jumping around by only clustering the data when the zoom level changes. Additionally this module keeps track of clustered information for each zoom level, making the algorithm faster the more you use it. This improved UI experience does affect performance and as such this algorithm is recommended for 2000 or less pushpins. Interested in reading more about how this algorithm was created? Check out this blog post.

GPX Parser

Download here

I created this module due to a number of requests I had received for such a module. This module allows you to easily pass in a URL to a GPX file and have it parsed into an EntityCollection which you can then render on Bing Maps. GPX is a type of XML file that is commonly used by GPS devices. It can be used to describe waypoints, tracks, and routes. Majority of the XML tags for V1 and V1.1 of the GPX schema are supported and all data is stored in a Metadata property, which is added to each entity.

Route Optimization - RouteSavvy Module

Download here

This module was created by OnTerra Systems, a Bing Maps Partner.

In today’s economy, it is more important than ever that companies optimize and manage their supply chains more efficiently. Given today’s fuel costs, product delivery with high quality of service and short delay times is paramount. Distribution accounts for a large proportion of the overall operational costs of a producer. Hence, effective and efficient management of transportation and distribution of goods are becoming increasingly important.

One of the key problems in this process is the optimization of delivery routes to customers. This problem is known as the “Travelling Salesman Problem” (TSP). RouteSavvy is a web service that helps solve this problem.

RouteSavvy is a simple but powerful tool that can take anywhere from 3 or 4 locations to hundreds of locations. It reorders them based on whether you'd like to visit them in a "round-trip" OR as a one-way trip, with the last stop chosen either by you or by the software (whichever is preferred).

Web developers can now easily integrate the RouteSavvy API into their web application by adding the RouteSavvy Map Module. The map module uses Ajax to call the RouteSavvy web service to optimize a given set of locations.

Here is a screen shot of a set random location optimized for a round trip:

Mini-Map Module

Download here

This module was created by OnTerra Systems, a Bing Maps Partner.

The Bing Maps Ajax v7 control doesn’t include support for adding a Mini-Map. The Mini-Map module adds a small map at the right corner of the parent map that’s collapsible and shows the extents covered by the current map. This module adds a mini map at the top right corner of the screen. Mini-map view helps to give a zoomed out overview of your location. Here is a screen shot of the implemented Mini-Map module:

I hope you find these new modules useful!

New Bing Maps Features Help You Feel Spatial…<3

Chris Pendleton — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:07:25 GMT

Coming back after the holiday season with a lot of energy, the Bing Maps team kicked off 2012 with releases of a new routing engine and the WPF control. Today--only 2 weeks later--we are now announcing several new features in the Bing Spatial Data Services and the Bing Maps Account Center. New features include a data source for traffic incidents, the ability to find points of interest (POI) along a route, wildcard-searches in your POI, incremental updates of POI data sources, improved reporting and more. Happy New Year! Are you feeling the love?

The Bing Spatial Data Services provide a REST interface that allows you to geocode or reverse-geocode your own POI data sources in batch-mode, manage these data sources and query your own or some public POI data sources that Bing Maps provides in a spatial context.

In this release, we added the following features:

Incremental Upload - Your own data sources now support incremental updates by setting the parameter ‘loadOperation’ in the Data Source Management API to ‘incremental’. So, once you’ve uploaded a data source of X number of locations into the Spatial Data Service, if you just want to add a few records you can just send those few records. We’ll handle the add and update functions for you!
Wildcard Searches - New Query Options support wildcard searches through filter criteria. Let’s say you want to query your data source to find the nearest locations around a point AND you want to filter the results based on the beginning or end of a keyword. For example, let’s say you have a “Store Manager” field in your data source. You can look for said manager by last name, “%Smith” or first name “John%” so you get all the Smiths or Johns within a region.
Traffic Incidents - Traffic Incidents for North America are now available as a public POI data source and can be accessed through the Query API. Now the traffic incidents you see on Bing Maps are available to you in your applications via a spatial query.
Find Near Route - The Bing Spatial Data Service supports now an additional spatialFilter which allows you to search for POI along a route. This is a game changer. Let’s say you’re a coffee company and you want to empower your users to have the ability find all your locations along their drive from, say Seattle to San Francisco…now you can! The Find Near Route Feature allows you to spatially query the points you’ve uploaded into SDS within a 1 mile buffer of your route.

http:// spatial.virtualearth.net /REST/v1/data/
439698230d90496596083f3fe7aafeb2/
TrafficIncidents/
TrafficIncident
?key=[YOUR_BING_MAPS_KEY]
&$format=json
&jsonp=callbackFindTrafficIncidentsNearRoute
&spatialFilter=nearRoute('47.678558349609375,-122.13098907470703',
'47.60356140136719,-122.32943725585937')

You will find a complete sample using the Bing Maps AJAX Control version 7 for visualization, the DirectionsManager class for driving directions, the TrafficLayer class for traffic-flow information and the Bing Spatial Data Services for traffic-incident information along a route here. Alternate versions of the SDK are available in PDF and .chm format, as well.

Note: Neither the Wildcard-search nor the spatial-filter ‘nearRoute’ are supported with the public data sources NAVTEQNA and NAVTEQEU.

The Bing Maps Account Center is the portal through which you can find information for development with Bing Maps, and also manage your account. It contains links to interactive and traditional SDKs, a facility to generate Bing Maps Keys, a web user interface to manage your own POI data sources and a reporting service through which you can retrieve statistics about your Bing Maps usage.

In this latest release we added the following features.

Additional data validation has been introduced for the upload of your own POI data sources.
Before it was already possible to add and edit records in a data source that you uploaded through the portal. You can now also download and delete data sources.
Image capturing adds now additional security during the generation of Bing Maps Keys.
Additional reports have been added to provide more details on the use of specific Bing Maps Keys.

We certainly hope you’re feeling special (and spatial!). We’re investing quite a bit of energy into Bing Maps and hope to see some killer apps. Happy Coding!!!

Johannes Kebeck & CP

Bing Maps Token Service Reminder: Upgrade to Keys Today!

Bing Maps Blog — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

For our current Bing Maps Platform customers using the Bing Maps Token Service, we want to remind you that this service will be retired on March 30, 2012. Please be sure to upgrade any of your applications that are using the Bing Maps Token Service to Bing Maps Keys before this date to ensure that your access to the Bing Maps Platform is not interrupted.

What Bing Maps Platform API’s does this upgrade apply to?

This upgrade only applies to the following Bing Maps Platform API’s:

Bing Maps AJAX Control v6.3 (and earlier versions)
Bing Maps SOAP Services
Bing Maps Silverlight Control

What are the benefits of using Bing Maps Keys instead of the Bing Maps Token Service?

Improved performance in accessing the Bing Maps Platform (i.e. the elimination of the requirement to call the Token Service prior to calling the Bing Maps API’s).
Unlike Bing Maps Tokens, Bing Maps Keys do not expire.
Enhanced management and reporting of your Bing Maps Platform usage (i.e. you can assign a unique Bing Maps Key to each of your applications to separately track the Bing Maps usage for each of your applications).

How can you tell if you are currently using the Bing Maps Token Service?

If your Bing Maps application is calling or referencing any of the following Bing Maps Platform URL’s (HTTP or HTTPS) you are very likely using the Bing Maps Token Service:
You can view the Legacy (MWS + Token) Usage Report by Category report in the View My Bing Maps API Usage section of the Bing Maps Account Center or view the Transaction Usage by Category report in the View Usage section of the Bing Maps Customer Services Site (the legacy Bing Maps Platform customer portal). If you see recent usage under those reports of the Bing Maps API types listed below then you are using the Bing Maps Token Service.
- LoadStandardMap
- CalculateRoute
- Geocode
- ReverseGeocode
- WS:CalculateRoute
- WS:CalculateRoutesFromMajorRoads
- WS:FindEntity
- WS:Geocode
- WS:GetImageryMetadata
- WS:GetMapUri
- WS:ReverseGeocode
- WS:Search

How do you get started with upgrading from the Bing Maps Token Service to Bing Maps Keys?

To get started, please follow the MSDN article, Migrating from Tokens to Keys, which explains how to obtain a Bing Maps Key, and provides guidance on upgrading your applications to Bing Maps Keys for applications using the Bing Maps AJAX Control, the Bing Maps Silverlight Control, or Bing Maps SOAP services.

Happy upgrading!

Partner Webcast Now Available: Add Bing Maps to Your Line of Business Applications

Bing Maps Blog — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Watch this on-demand webcast to understand the partner opportunity for Bing Maps and how to qualify for partner benefits. You’ll learn how easy it is to add Bing Maps as a data presentation layer for spatial insight in your Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics, and Windows Azure solutions. Deploying Bing Maps as part of your innovative solutions can help you attract new customers and expand revenue.

Note: Must belong to the MS Partner Network to access the webcast. Not a partner? Enroll today--it's free and only takes a few minutes!

Love Aerial Imagery? Experience it on your PC!

Bing Maps Blog — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Some of the best imagery from the Bing Maps Global Ortho Project is collected into Windows 7 Desktop Themes. These themes change your PC desktop experience as the images rotate through on a regular basis so you never know which part of the world you’ll be looking at next! The United States version is the most content-rich Windows 7 Desktop Theme with nearly 200 images from all parts of the Continental United States, and has had almost a million downloads. The European version just launched last month and contains photos from 10 different countries in Western Europe. Once downloaded, both of these themes are updated through RSS feeds as new imagery is available. For a deeper dive on these themes, check out this post . What are you waiting for? Go download one today!

Bing Maps Aerial Imagery – United States
Windows 7 desktop theme
Click here to Download
Click here for Details

Bing Maps Aerial Imagery – Europe
Windows 7 desktop theme
Click here to Download
Click here for Details

Upcoming Bing Maps Webcasts Now Open for Registration

Bing Maps Blog — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

The Bing Maps Platform from Microsoft enables organizations to easily and cost-effectively deliver geospatial content to the customers and businesses they serve. Not only does this optimize existing investments in GIS and imagery services, it allows organizations to save money using Bing Maps by making strong connections with customers and exposing relevant content easily on a map from Bing.

What’s New in the Bing Maps Platform? | February 16, 2012, 2pm Eastern time, 60-minutes

Attend this session for an overview of the latest capabilities in the Bing Maps Platform. You’ll learn the latest on the Bing Maps Imagery program, how to view the meta data and other features in the platform including the best portal to see the latest new imagery sets.

Using the BingMapsPortal.com and keys with Bing Maps Platform | March 15, 2012, 2pm Eastern time, 60-minutes

Attend this session and learn how to use the bingmapsportal.com, tips for using/hiding your Bing Maps key and other helpful development hints.

Bing Maps Spatial Data Services | April 19, 2012, 2pm Eastern time, 60-minutes

Attend this session and learn how to take advantage of the Bing Maps Spatial Data Services included with the Bing Maps Platform for data hosting and findnearby/bound box queries.

For more details and to register, visit here.

Check out the New War Horse Interactive Map on MSN

Bing Maps Blog — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:50:00 GMT

Many of you have heard of Steven Spielberg’s latest hit movie War Horse, which came out in USA theatres on December 25 and is launching in Europe in January. What you may not have heard of is the War Horse Journey on MSN. It’s a tool that allows you to explore the journey of Joey (the war horse). For more on the Journey tool, check out this MSN Blog Post. We at Bing Maps just wanted to call out our partner in the UK, Shoothill, who worked with the movie to create a true one-of-a-kind mapping experience!

Here’s a quick overview of the Timemap in the War Horse Journey, but nothing can compare with just spending time in the map itself. The Timemap combines present day maps with WWI era imagery all in one place! It has 3 components: video/photos, aerial photos and historic maps. The fade slider functionality lets you compare maps from WWI with today. Take a look…

Villers Bretonneux, France
December, 1917

Villers Bretonneux, France
Present Day

Historic trench map of Kemmel, Belgium
April, 1917

Belgium landscape today

Go spend some time playing around with the Timemap and the War Horse Journey. The Timemap is an incredible way to explore history and shows the lasting mark WWI has made on our world.

Note that the War Horse Journey is available for a limited time only, so get out there and experience history today!

Announcing the Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation Control v1

Chris Pendleton — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Back in August, I announced the Beta for our Bing Maps WPF control. The uptake in the Microsoft Developer Community has been stellar and the feedback – immensely helpful. As a result and as promised to those across the Microsoft Developer Network, we’re officially releasing The Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation Control, Version 1.

The control was built atop of the beta, so we still have all of the touch enabled greatness for Surface v 2’s Pixel Sense, inertia and full rotation. We’ve kept most of the classes, methods and properties in place from the beta – requiring little work to install and register v1. And, per community feedback on the Bing Maps MSDN Forums we added the following features (and fixed a few bugs):

Support for tile layers – you can now overlay your own tile layers atop the map control.
Turning off the base tile layer – this is useful for when you don’t need/want to use our base map tiles and instead would prefer to use your own without overlaying them atop of ours. The control won’t request the tiles which reduces downloads and improves rendering performance.
SSL Support – since many of you are using the WPF control in secure applications, you can now make tile and service request over SSL without issue.
Hiding the scale bar – if you don’t want a scale bar (perhaps your map is small and the scale bar clutters the map) you can turn it off. In fact, the only elements you can’t turn off are the Bing logo and the copyrights.
New copyright service – provides accurate copyright for our data vendors.
Additional inertia – inertia is now enabled for the mouse and is on by default for touch.
Miscellaneous bug fixes – thanks for the feedback on the MSDN Forums, the Bing Maps Blog, e-mail and Twitter. Good finds people.

I have to give it up for my (small) crack team of people involved in the making of the WPF Control. This was one of those 10% projects that we all really had a passion to get done because it was the right thing to do for the Microsoft Developer Community. So, we found the time, slipped the release a month (for quality) and, as the guys over in Surface said, “just got it done.” Our internal motto kept stoking the fire to push this bad boy out the door…”WPF, FTW!”

Now, download the Bing Maps WPF Control, build a killer app and make us proud.

The Microsoft 311 Service Center with Bing Maps

Bing Maps Blog — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:55:00 GMT

Microsoft now has an all-in-one fully integrated solution for city governments with the 311 Citizen Services Center. It combines the power of several Microsoft technologies and has both a citizen-facing portal and a back-end management module, including interactive Bing Maps for both components. When cities use the 311 service center, citizens can easily report outages, potholes, etc. by locating them on a map. City workers and contractors can use Bing Maps for service request information and updates. 311 Service Center is another great example of how Bing Maps integrates with Microsoft Dynamics® CRM to show the data the customer is managing, and to speed up the decision process.

To learn more about how your city can benefit from the Citizen Services Center (311), visit http://www.microsoft.com/gov311 and watch this video.

Citizen-facing portal with self-service and multi-access channels

Centralized management back-end system for servicing requests

Bing Maps New Routing Engine

Chris Pendleton — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:01:00 GMT

Did you happen to notice the new routing engine we implemented on Bing Maps? No? I suppose that’s a good thing since your service was never interrupted. However, I can tell you that we’re enjoying the reduced latency, high performance, low overhead benefits of a new route calculation algorithm that changes the game in how driving directions queries are computed. It started when I took over as PM of backend services for Bing Maps. The Microsoft Research team presented this crazy new idea to replace our modified Dijkstra's algorithm with the blandly named “Customizable Route Planning” algo. We’ve been using our own modified Dijkstra for years, it’s done a great job and it’s flexible – so, why would we change that? Once we saw the calculation numbers it was a no brainer to begin implementation immediately. For any of our route calculations we’re now processing requests twice as fast as we ever have. Oh, snaps! Now, if only CRP could double the speed limit. Future enhancement!

The CRP routing engine comes with some special sauce too. We exposed a feature in the API for alternate routes, so when you’d like to see additional options for the route you can request up to 3 routes in one request using the maxSolutions method. You can then display them on the map for visual reference.

So, how does it work? Well, it’s 3 major steps: Preprocessing. More preprocessing. Then, real time query calculation. Easy, right?! Here’s an excerpt from the CRP

Basic Algorithm. Our metric-independent preprocessing stage partitions the graph into connected cells with at most U (an input parameter) vertices each, with as few boundary arcs (arcs with endpoints in di erent cells) as possible. The metric customization stage builds a graph H containing all boundary vertices (those with at least one neighbor in another cell) and boundary arcs of G. It also contains a clique for each cell C: for every pair (v;w) of boundary vertices in C, we create an arc (v;w) whose cost is the same as the shortest path (restricted to C) between v and w (or in nite if w is not reachable from v). We do so by running Dijkstra from each boundary vertex. Note that H is an overlay [24]: the distance between any two vertices in H is the same as in G. Finally, to perform a query between s and t, we run a bidirectional version of Dijkstra's algorithm on the graph consisting of the union of H, Cs, and Ct. (Here Cv denotes the subgraph of G induced by the vertices in the cell containing v.) As already mentioned, this is the basic strategy of separator-based methods. In particular, HiTi [19] uses edge-based separators and cliques to represent each cell. Unfortunately, HiTi has not been tested on large road networks; experiments were limited to small grids, and the original proof of concept does not appear to have been optimized using modern algorithm engineering techniques. Our rst improvement over HiTi and similar algorithms is to use PUNCH [5] to partition the graph. Recently developed to deal with road networks, it routinely nds solutions with half as many boundary edges (or fewer), compared to the general-purpose partitioners (such as METIS [20]) commonly used by previous algorithms. Better partitions reduce customization time and space, leading to faster queries. For our experiments, we used relatively long runs of PUNCH, taking about an hour. Our results would not change much if we used the basic version of PUNCH, which is only about 5% worse but runs in mere minutes. We use parallelism: queries run forward and reverse searches on two CPU cores, and customization uses all four (each cell is processed independently).

If you’re really hardcore, you can read the full paper on the Microsoft Research web site. Special thanks to the Microsoft Research Team - Daniel Delling, Andrew V. Goldberg, Thomas Pajor, and Renato F. Werneck.

Migration Tip Archive

Bing Maps Blog — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:45:00 GMT

For Multimap and MapPoint Web Service customers, there are several blog posts from the past year that have helpful migration tips. Read the posts below to understand more about the migration process and get tips and tricks from the experts.

Bing Maps Updates—November 2011

Upgrade from Bing Maps Tokens to Keys

Updates to Bing Maps: REST API, AJAX Control v7, and Account Center

Dev Tip: Repositioning an Infobox

New Module for v7 Adds Support for Long Routes

Updates to the Bing Maps Account Center – Data Source Management

Uploading Excel Data to the Bing Spatial Data Services

Migration Tip: The Value of Spatial Data Services (SDS)

Modular Plug-in for Customizable Infobox Control

Migration Tip: Two New Store Locator Templates

Using Bing Maps with SQL Server Spatial

How to Search by Driving Time with AJAX v7, REST, and Spatial Data Services

Migration Resources Posted for Multimap Customers!

Bing Maps Updates

Bing Maps Blog — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Today we are announcing the release of several updates and new features in the Bing Maps REST web services and the Bing Spatial Data Service.

Bing Maps REST Web Services

New features are available for the Locations and the Imagery service. Most notably are:

Additional Properties in the Geocoding Results

Previously the geocoder returned a set of properties that included the coordinates, address and certain flags to indicate the confidence in the result as well as the type of the entity that was returned, e.g. a full address, a landmark or a city. With the new release the geocoder returns now additionally a property CalculationMethod that indicates the accuracy of the geocode. Possible values are:

Interpolation: The geocode point was matched to a point on a road using interpolation.
InterpolationOffset: The geocode point was matched to a point on a road using interpolation with an additional offset to shift the point to the side of the street.
ParcelCentroid: The geocode point was matched to the center of a parcel.
Rooftop: The geocode point was matched to the rooftop of a building.

Since Rooftop- or Parcel-geocodes are usually not on a street, the geocoder provides the CalculationMethod as part of an array of GeocodePoints so that developers can choose based on the UsageType if they would prefer for example the Rooftop-Geocode for displaying the location on a map or the interpolated geocode for calculating a route. In the screenshot below the blue circle represents the rooftop-geocode and the black circle represents the interpolated geocode.

Furthermore the geocoder returns now a property MatchCodes to indicate if the result is a unique match, if the result is UpHierarchy (e.g. the house-number was not found, but the street was found) or if the result is ambiguous.

Optionally return the Neighborhood in the Geocoding-Results

By adding an optional parameter includeNeighborhood to a geocoding request it is now possible to return the neighborhood as part of the address. For example:

Improvements for the Rendering of Static Maps

The Imagery Service that is being used to render static maps has been improved by increasing the limit for pushpins from 18 to 100. In order to generate a map with more than 18 pushpins you need to use the HTTP Post instead of the Get method and provide the list of Pushpins in the body of the request. For more details see the documentation here.

Additionally the service will now calculate automatically the best-view -- i.e. zoom-level and center-point -- to display a number of pushpins and you do not necessarily need to provide these information explicitly with the request.

Bing Spatial Data Service

New Public Data Sources with NAVTEQ POI

The Bing Spatial Data Service provides two public data sources with NAVTEQ POI for North America and Europe. The POIs are grouped into categories and can be accessed using the Query API. A request to find the nearest ATMs in Redmond Town Center would look for example like:

http://spatial.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/data
/f22876ec257b474b82fe2ffcb8393150
/NavteqNA
/NavteqPOIs
?spatialFilter=bbox(47.672629542372334,-122.1319303512573,
47.68082140391499,-122.11527919769284)
&$filter=EntityTypeID Eq '3578'
&$format=json
&jsonp=QueryCallBack&
$top=250
&key=Bing_Maps_Key

You will find a complete sample that refreshes the results whenever you pan or zoom the map here.

Please note: if you are not an enterprise customer you need to request access to the Bing Spatial Data Service following the procedure mentioned in the documentation here.