Today we have the distinct pleasure of announcing the release of the new Bing AJAX map control v7 (V7). It seems to be the year of 7s at Microsoft and we’re excited to carry on the reputation that V7 does indeed denote something very special.
Let’s start off with discussing V7 performance:
– V7 is less than 1/3 the size of our v6.3 control. This smaller size helps V7 load faster than our previous control.
– V7 renders multiple points on a map up to 3 times faster than v6.3. This improvement will help you deliver more information to your users, faster.
These numbers are based on internal tests of our compressed controls, including all secondary JavaScript, CSS and image-files. I invite you to try out V7 for yourself and compare. Add 10, 100 or 100s of pins and evaluate the performance. I think you’ll be pleased.
While you’re doing this, make sure to check out three other major features:
Optimized for mobile web. As more business is done on mobile, you need to have a control that’s built for mobile browsing. V7 delivers in these scenarios with a small control size, support for HTML5 and touch support for mobile devices.
Enhanced Bird’s eye. V7 introduces our new “Bird’s eye” to AJAX. It’s the same 45-degree perspective, viewable from all 4 compass directions imagery that you love – enhanced to include seamless, smooth panning at all zoom levels, life-like building models in urban centers and 3D-like terrain features. This new experience is ripe to provide a differentiated and highly useful perspective to your applications.
New map style. First seen on http://www.bing.com/maps, our new map style for “road” and “hybrid” modes is now the default map style for V7. This means that when you build a V7 app, you’ll have the opportunity to show it off on an updated canvas with improved look/feel, readability and interaction with data overlays. We’ve received some great customer feedback since its first debut and we’ll be incorporating that into an updated version soon.
It also means that effective today, all Bing Maps customers have the opportunity to opt-in to the new map style for testing or production “go live” scenarios across all controls/APIs (REST Services, SOAP Services and Silverlight Map Control opt-in also went live today). This opt-in period will end on April 30, 2011 and beginning on May 1, 2011, the new map style will become the default and only road style delivered across all Bing mapping services.
So there you are –V7 is fast, is great for mobile web and introduces new and differentiated ways for you to connect with your customers. To learn more about all of the features and enhancements in V7, take a look at the Bing AJAX map control v7 SDKand the recent announcement regarding Bing.com/Maps. Also look out for future blog posts that delve deeper into individual functionality.
I’d like to thank our engineering team for all of their hard work and our customers for building some of the best applications on the web – I look forward to seeing what you do with V7 on desktop and mobile!
