In a previous blog post  we had a lap around the new support for Custom Geospatial Data in the Bing Spatial Data Services (SDS). This time around we will build upon that tutorial and extend the app so that we can talk to it and have it talk back. Check out the video to see and hear what we’re going to build. In order to achieve this, we leverage the Bing Speech Recognition Control for Windows 8.1 as well as the Windows 8.1 SDK ...
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In Bing Maps we can easily create simple polygons. Simple polygons consist of a single exterior ring of coordinates. However, in more advance applications it is useful to be able to draw more complex polygons. Take for instance the borders of Lesotho, which is a land locked country within the main exterior borders of South Africa. In this case to properly represent this country’s borders we would need to have a hole in the polygon. In this...
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Clustering of pushpins in Bing Maps consists of grouping together nearby locations into clusters. As the user zooms in, the clusters break apart to reveal the individual locations. The goal of this process is to reduce the number of pushpins that are displayed on the map at any given time. This results in better performance of the map control and also a better experience for the user, as they will be able to see the map and not have pins hiding...
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When building a Bing Maps application, you may want to give the user the ability to drag a pushpin. In the JavaScript version of Bing Maps this can be done by setting the draggable property of a pushpin to true, but the Pushpin class in the .NET version does not have this property, so what can you do? In this blog post, I’ll show you how to create a reusable user control that gives you draggable pushpins, plus a lot more flexibility in...
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The Bing Maps for Enterprise platform offers extensive localization capabilities for map navigation, map labels, directions, and geocoding results in the AJAX v7 map control, Windows Store map control, and REST Services. Typically, you will also have your own custom data that you will be displaying within your mapping application. In this post, we will show how you can use another of the Bing Developer Services – the Bing Translator Control...
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Recently we published a blog post titled "How to Create a Spatial Web Service That Connects a Database to Bing Maps Using EF5." This post showed how to create a web service that connected Bing Maps to a database using the spatial functionality in Entity Framework 5 (EF5). In that example we only implemented a basic nearby search query. In this post, we are going to expand upon that application and add in more advance spatial search...
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Entity Framework is a quick and easy way to connect a database to your application. It provides a set of tools that allow you to auto generate your classes for your database tables. Also, it provides you with easy-to-use functionality for connecting and querying your data using LINQ. When Entity Framework was originally released, it simplified my life when it came to connecting a database to Bing Maps via a web service. Unfortunately, it didn...
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Heat maps are an effective means of visualizing geography-based trends by showing the relative density of location-based data. We can see where we have ‘hot spots’ in our data, and use this insight to drive better decisions for application users. In this blog post, we will show how you can visualize location data in the form of a heat map within Windows Store apps, pulling in both public points-of-interest data sources available within...
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With the Polaris release of Dynamics CRM Online, Bing Maps has been integrated directly into the Process forms for Accounts, Contacts and Leads. The integration is quite basic, however; the existing address details associated with the entity are geocoded when the form is displayed, and the results are used to show a map of the location. No additional data can be overlaid in the map, feedback on the quality of the geocode match are not provided...
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Bing Maps provides a variety of APIs and controls. One of which is the Bing Maps AJAX Control that was originally designed to provide interactive maps for the web, but meanwhile also powers the WinJS control in the Bing Maps SDK for Windows Store apps. The Bing Maps AJAX control has a slim core to speed up the initial load of a website, is optimized for performance using HTML5 technologies and implements a modular concept that allows the loading...
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