Be smooth: Optimize Bing Maps in multipage Windows Store apps (JavaScript)

Be smooth: Optimize Bing Maps in multipage Windows Store apps (JavaScript)

Bing Maps is the most widely used map control inside of Windows Store apps. Many simple apps consist of a single page user experience while many other consist of multiple pages. Many developers like to use Bing Maps throughout their application, but have found that this results in the map control constantly being loaded/disposed as the user navigates between pages. This doesn’t make for the best user experience, as there is a slight delay due to...
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Bring Your Maps to Life: Creating Animations with Bing Maps (JavaScript)

Bring Your Maps to Life: Creating Animations with Bing Maps (JavaScript)

Bing Maps is a very powerful mapping platform that is often used for creating engaging user experiences. The fluid interactive maps make for a great canvas when visualizing location based data. In this blog post we are going to take a look at how to make the user experience a little more engaging by adding custom animations that can be used in both web and Windows Store apps. Full source code for this blog post can be found in the MSDN Code...
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Make Clickable Shapes in the Native Bing Maps Control

Make Clickable Shapes in the Native Bing Maps Control

The native Bing Maps Windows Store control has two types of shapes: polygons and polylines. These shapes are great for representing areas and paths on the map. Often it is useful to be able to associate some information or metadata with these shapes. In past versions of Bing Maps we could easily store this information in the Tag property of the shape. This makes it easy to retrieve this data when a shape is clicked or tapped. Unfortunately,the...
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Complex Polygons in Bing Maps

Complex Polygons in Bing Maps

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. 
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Clustering Pushpins in Windows Store Apps

Clustering Pushpins in Windows Store Apps

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. 
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Heat Maps in Windows Store Apps (JavaScript)

Heat Maps in Windows Store Apps (JavaScript)

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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