Cloud Computing for Developers

Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control (CTP Release)

Finally, the CTP release of the new Virtual Earth ASP.NET control is available.

ASP.NET developers can now integrate Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps simply by dragging and dropping an ASP.NET Server Control in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer. No JavaScript programming is required. This control can be combined with ASP.NET AJAX capabilities to provide ASP.NET Serverside processing without the need of coding in JavaScript.

The Map control is available right in your toolbox of Visual Studio

You can drag and drop the control from toolbox onto your web page and set some properties and you are ready to go.

Server side events for panning/zooming, find/directions are available in addition to client side events for the map control.

You can control how map displays on your web page with standard functionality like MapMode (2D/3D), MapStyle(Road/Aerial), displaying dashboard and setting its size, setting the zoom levels, zooming in/out, panning etc.

You can add shapes to map from ASP.NET Server Side using provided methods. You can query different shapes/layers in the Map and delete them as well.

Downloads  

• To download: http://dev.live.com/tools and download the Windows Live Tools July CTP release.
• For a Developer Evaluation account (to access Traffic): https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/ (requires Live ID)

The suite of tools is currently a community technology preview, we strongly discourage any web site from going live using these controls.

This CTP release only targets English (United States).

Requirements

Operating System

• Microsoft Windows XP SP 2 or
• Microsoft Windows Vista

Development Tools

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 (already installed if you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or .NET 3.5 Framework installed)
• Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008