Microsoft can take any battle loosely, but if they are competing with Google, the competition will be active fiercely. Last year, the software giant announced that they were pretty serious with their map business, as they launched a Beta release of Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation Control. Four months later, now, we see Microsoft officially releasing Bing Maps WPF Control, Version 1.
The control has its basis on the Beta platform of Bing Maps. So, all of the features of Bing Maps will remain, such as various map styles to toggle through, pan and zoom keyboard controls, and Microsoft Surface (the touch-enabled facet with support for Surface v 2’s Pixel Sense technology).
Many critics and experts have even shared their views on it. Drew Bowling of WebProNews said that he preferred the look of the terrain on Bing Maps than Google Maps. .
To note a basic difference, posted below are screenshots of the Plates from Bing and Google respectively.
Bing’s Plate:
Google’s Plate:
However, Google Maps still are more fun to use. One would not have a monotonous feel when mapping his locations.
Coming back to Bing Maps, a recent blog post from Chris Pendleton, the Lead Program Manager for Bing Maps, noted:
Per community feedback on the Bing Maps MSDN Forums we added the following features (and fixed a few bugs):
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Support for tile layers – you can now overlay your own tile layers atop the map control.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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New copyright service – provides accurate copyright for our data vendors.
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Additional inertia – inertia is now enabled for the mouse and is on by default for touch.
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Miscellaneous bug fixes – thanks for the feedback on the MSDN Forums, the Bing Maps Blog, e-mail and Twitter. Good finds people.
Again, Pendleton seems to be knowing the fact accurately, that they have a perfect tool for the users, as he continued:
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!”