The new Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control and the VESMP CTP Interactive SDK were made available at the Mix (beta). The map control is a Silverlight 3.0 plug-in (available as a beta) that streams data directly to a map. Currently available interactive maps on Google or Microsoft Live.com all use AJAX that only allows zoom levels to a certain level (about 19), but this control allows deeper levels (deep zoom). The transitions between zoom levels are very smooth. It also allows the display of more then 500 pins (actually brushes). The SDK CTP is available at http://tinyurl.com/c2eqfy.
The control can be coded with Xaml or C# and one can override mouse/keyboard events. Any maps or projections can be used, not just what Microsoft provides. There are no current capabilities in the control to take in spatial data from SQL Server database (SQL Server 2008 already supports some geometry types currently) – not known if this will be in the final release. Route geometry can be stuck as a BLOB in the database and VE team is working with SQL Server team to have types introduced for storing the geo data directly in SQL Server.
Neither, birds eye view or 3D transformations works currently in the control (there was a comment by the speaker that the team is working on something big that cannot be disclosed currently). Same is true of multi-touch and Surface team. CAML support may or may not be in CTP.
The currently existing AJAX map control will not go away.
Virtual Earth web services (launched last year) allows communication with VE platform through WCF. Services included for imagery (metadata of the map-aerial images overlay), routing from map, geo-coding (locating locations) and search (yellow page listings) capabilities. There’s an SLA for web services.
