Announcing Bing Maps V8 control for the Web

[Lurker]

It is with great pleasure that we announce the preview release of the Bing Maps V8 control, Microsoft modern web mapping platform. The Bing Maps V8 control reduces development time by requiring less code to implement more features into your app. It also brings significant performance improvement by using the HTML5 canvas, which provides the ability to render vector data significantly faster than previous versions of the Bing Maps JavaScript control. It also supports rendering thousands of more shapes, allowing users to view more data and gain deeper insights into their data. In addition to this we have added a number of exciting new features such as Autosuggest, Streetside imagery and many business intelligence tools.

We dug through over 5 years of customer and developer feedback to understand what types of apps developers were creating with Bing maps. From this knowledge we made several improvements in the V8 control, which makes it better aligned with the type of apps developers have been trying to develop with Bing Maps.

Watch the announcement made at the Microsoft Build conference here.

Rich new features

 

 

In addition to modernizing our web map control by moving to HTML5, we have added a number of powerful new features.

Here is a summary of just some of them:

• Autosuggest – Provides suggestions dynamically as you type a location in a search box.
• Clustering – Visualize large sets of pushpins by having overlapping pushpins group and ungroup automatically as users change zoom level.
• GeoJSON Support – Easily import and export GeoJSON data, one of the most common file formats used for sharing and storing spatial data.
• Heatmaps – Visualize the density of data points as a heatmap.
• Streetside imagery – Explore 360-degrees of street level imagery.
• Spatial Math module – Provides a large set of spatial math operations from calculating distances and areas, to performing boolean operations on shapes.
• Spatial Data Services module – Easily access and overlay data stored in the Bing Spatial Data Services on the map. In addition to being able to access your own data that you can host in this service, you can also access our administrative boundary data as well.
• Version Branches – In the past, each version of Bing Maps had a single release branch for each version of our control. With V8 we have three release branches: Experimental, Release and Frozen. The Experimental branch will regularly be updated with the latest and greatest features as soon as they are available before they have been thoroughly tested. The Release branch is the main branch that most apps will use, new features are added after they have been thoroughly tested in the Experimental branch. The Frozen branch is designed for those creating mission critical apps and will be updated much less frequently than the main Release branch. By the time a feature makes it to the Frozen branch, most if not all bugs should have been found and fixed.

How to get started with V8

It’s easy to get started with the Bing Maps V8 control. In addition to having documentation on MSDN, we have also created a new interactive SDK for V8, which provides lots of useful interactive code samples to help you learn how to use V8.

• Interactive SDK
• MSDN Documentation

To use Bing Maps in your own application you will need a Bing Maps key. You can get one from the Bing Maps portal, or if you are an Azure user, through the Azure marketplace. To find out more about licensing options and learn about Bing Maps control, please visit www.microsoft.com/maps.

 

 

source : 

https://blogs.bing.com/maps/April-2016/Announcing-Bing-Maps-V8-control-for-the-Web