The videos from the last Bing Maps UK UG meeting are now available online at the group homepage – http://bingmapsuk.ning.com.
Apologies for the poor audio quality – as a group we’ve always felt that there was a benefit in moving around and using different venues for our meetings. On this occasion, we were delighted that the British Computer Society offered to host our meeting (our last two meetings were held at Infusion and Microsoft, respectively).
Unfortunately, one downside of using different meeting venues is that we have to adapt to a variety of location setups and facilities, and we don’t always know in advance details of things like what (if any) sound systems are available, the quality of the internet connection, the acoustic conditions etc. etc. On this occasion the videos are just copies of the video that was streamed live over a limited bandwidth wireless internet connection, and the presenters were not individually mic’ed so the audio is just from a low-quality room mic.
If you’d like clarification of any of the points you (can’t quite) hear on the videos, please let me know. I thought I’d draw your attention to a couple of points that Johannes makes in his session:
- Carla Parry has left Microsoft and taken up a new role at Argos.
- Chris Pendleton has also moved on into a new role in the Bing mobile team. Brian Hendricks has taken over some of his role in managing the Bing Maps blog account etc.
- The MS Bing Maps team itself has been integrated into the Bing Mobile team (so Chris Pendleton still isn’t very far away!)
- Bing Maps applications now exist for WP7, iPhone, and Android. The v7 AJAX control is also officially supported on mobile devices.
- AJAX control v7 is smoother faster, supports HTML 5, and now officially supported on mobile devices.
- Additional features will be added to the v7 control in a modular fashion. i.e. there will be a “routing” library add-in, a “geocoding” library add-in. Only including those libraries required in a given application will help keep download size small and efficient.
- Since v7 is a (significantly) breaking change to the API, v6.3 is expected to have a long end-of-life, and will probably continue to be supported for the next 2 years.
- There has been significant investment in the REST services, with more development still to come. The spatial data services, for example, will add in the ability to load custom POI data to replace the existing functionality of the Mappoint Customer Data Service.
- There is no current plan to implement the Extended modes for Silverlight (Birdseye, Streetside) in a production environment. These features may in fact surface via the AJAX control first.
- Infobox support will be added to the v7 AJAX control in the next release, probably due February 2011.
- For batch geocoding, the spatial data services geocode dataflow is free, and can be used to process batches of 200,000 records or 100mb. Up to 10 requests can be made to the service in any 24hr period.
Also be sure to check out the other videos from members of the group telling us about how they’ve implemented Bing Maps:
- The Woodland Trust tell us how they’re using Bing Maps to create and display a database of natural woodland, and using it to support their advocacy and campaigning to save England’s ancient forests.
- Earthware show how they’ve used Bing Maps and Silverlight as part of a Business Intelligence dashboard for an American ministry.
- 2020 Imaging use the Bing Maps 3D control together with video streams, image recognition, document management and other technologies in a WPF-based security control application.
Massive thanks to those members who volunteered to speak, and please let me know if you’re interested in showing anything at a future meeting!
Alastair Aitchison 