Silverlight Map control of Virtual Earth
The virtual earth development team has finally added the new silverlight-based Map control to the latest edition. You can play with this added version, but cannot use it in a production environment as there are chances for few changes in the next release. Anyone can use this feature as an entire control is in user’s hand. You can plot or overlay rich media content using silverlight. If you have used JavaScript map control then you must have experienced delay in downloading. When you map more than 300 pushpins, it will take a long time to download. With Silverlight you will experience great improvements in the performance levels. Even if you plot more than 1000 pushpins, it will take few seconds to download.
With the new silverlight control you do not need to worry about JavaScript behavior. It gives different effect on different operating systems. The code can be controlled or manipulated by pure .NET code. Integrating with JavaScript is also easy as silverlight’ HTML code will act as a bridge between the back-end and front-end. The control works so efficiently only because of virtual earth underneath mapping technique, which makes new improvement very easy. The limit is based on the client computer where the application is running. In the coming few months you will be able to use it for commercial purpose.
There are big changes in the technology of loading tiles for rendering massive amount of data onto a map. The lower zoom level is summoned when user is browsing on higher levels and engaged in observing the high level images. After doing great research on technology it has arrived to community Technology preview. If you wish to get access in CTP, you need to register yourself with Microsoft connect. After registering you will get the documentation as well as the liabilities. There is an interactive guide, which allows you to submit bugs and other issues. You will get offline SDK help on Via Window Live link on the site.
Silverlight gives you ability to separate designer’s work from developer’s one. Most developers are happy that it gives button-click functionality to execute desired functioning’s. It leverages the “DeepZoom” technology that helps to smoothly render between the different zoom-levels. The framework is very powerful with animation and integration of videos. Not like JavaScript, silverlight provides same user experience in different browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox as JavaScript implementation is browser specific. It does not need even half line of codes as in AJAX control.
You can easily create your application with the Virtual Earth silverlight map control. They will find simple to connect to the database to retrieve the data. To work with this control you need to verify that you have Visual Studio 2008 SPI installed on your computer and as stated above you must have registered with Microsoft Connect to use this control. Once you do these two important things you will be easily able to build application. You will get reference projects on Microsoft site. You can use few libraries provided by this sample projects.
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