Bing Maps editing control for the Web

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.

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.

We want your feedback

We are always working to improve the Bing Maps platform and want your feedback. There are three ways to provide us feedback:

If you license Bing Maps, you can always send feedback to the Bing Maps Enterprise technical support team and they will ensure it makes it to the proper team.
Anyone can provide feedback on the Bing Maps forums. We regularly monitor these to help developers.
Submit it as an idea on Bing Listens: https://binglistens.uservoice.com/

Having an issue getting your code to work? Have a topic you would like us to cover on the Bing Maps blog? Try asking for help in the Bing Maps forums. We’re here to help and want to make sure you get the most out of the Bing Maps platform.

Since we shared the Bing Maps Preview* in July, you’ve given us more than 46,000 suggestions and pieces of feedback! Thank you. The team is passionate about the new experience and it means a lot to have so many of you taking the time to share your thoughts. As we sifted through the feedback, a number of common suggestions bubbled up to the top of the list:

People loved the new cards but lots of you want to be able to hide and show the cards on the map canvas.
Many of you would like to be able to turn map labels on and off in aerial and birds-eye modes.
We didn’t show the distance and time between waypoints in directions, which a lot of people said was useful.
There was an overwhelming ask for Ordnance Survey Maps to be enabled in the UK.

As we promised in our initial announcement, we’ve listened to you and have implemented numerous changes to the Bing Maps Preview, including the four suggestions above. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Hide/show all cards

We learned that there are times when it would be useful to just have an unencumbered view of the map. You can now easily achieve this by hiding the cards.

Turn map labels on/off in aerial and birds-eye modes

Based on your feedback, we’ve made it easier to select the map style or mode that you want to use. As part of this change, we added a way to enable and disable labels in aerial and birds-eye modes.

Display the distance and time per segment in directions

Bing Maps Preview now shows the distance and time per segment in directions, for routes with more than two waypoints. Additionally, you can also collapse/expand each of these segments depending on which ones you want to see.

Ordnance Survey Maps (for the UK)

Ordnance Survey maps was the most requested feature so far, no doubt for many of you who love being in the great outdoors and are looking for a familiar, information-rich experience that you can’t find on other mapping sites. We’re pleased to announce that Ordnance Survey maps are now available to users in the UK!

We’re not done yet – there’s more to come

Try these improvements out, and let us know what you think using the feedback button on the site, by going to Bing Listens, or tweeting us @bingmaps. The Bing Maps team will continue to review your feedback and update the Bing Maps Preview. Look for more exciting new features and improvements designed to make your trips easier and more enjoyable!

Milan Tomic

Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.