Today we announced some exciting updates to the Bing Maps Platform!  We are excited to announce the launch of the Bing Maps Silverlight Control along with other Bing Maps platform enhancements to improve performance and ease of use.

The Bing Maps Silverlight Control leverages the power of Silverlight to provide a powerful and rich platform for building mapping and location-based applications.   I want to thank you for all the great feedback from the Silverlight map control CTP release last March. We were able to incorporate a lot of your feedback into the control, and today it is version 1.0 and is production ready!

We are also rolling out performance improvements across the platform with improvements to our distributed data center infrastructure.  We are also making it easier to get started with the Bing Maps platform with the new Bing Maps Account Center where you can create an account and use a simple key to access the Bing Maps Silverlight and AJAX Controls and Web Services.  With the key you can try out the Bing Maps Platform for free and it is free to use for non profit, education, and small websites. 

Bing Maps Silverlight Control

Here is a list of some of the features in the Bing Maps Silverlight Control v1.0:

  • Silverlight 3 including support for Out of Browser
  • Road and Aerial Map Modes with and without Labels featuring Deep Zoom with the Silverlight MultiScaleImage control
  • Position Silverlight UIElements on the Map including images, video, pushpins, polylines, and polygons with a few lines of XAML
  • Data Binding with the MapItemsControl
  • Use Bing Maps Web Services with the control for advanced Search, Geocoding, and Routing functionality
  • World Wrap / infinite pan across the dateline
  • Design-time integration with Expression Blend
  • Scripting interface for coding with JavaScript
  • Embed Silverlight (and AJAX) Maps with a single URL in a web page
  • Online Interactive SDK with demos and sample code showing how to use the control

Here are some useful links to try out the new Bing Maps Silverlight Control:

Try it out today and let us know what you think!