Apart from the AJAX Control toolkit we saw in the previous chapters, Bing Maps offer their data through a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface too. By constructing API specific URLs, this interface allows operations including the creation of static maps with pushpins, geocoding addresses, tracing routes, and retrieving imagery metadata.
The amount of data consumption is subject to your Bing Maps account (more information about billable and non-billable transactions can be found by looking at the Usage Reports, which are explained at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff859477.aspx).
In this chapter we will introduce one of these services, the Locations API. This interface provides the means for finding a location by address, by query, or by a point on the map. The point is a pair of floating point values representing latitude and longitude in decimal format, and it is passed to a URL template. See an example using a pair...