Book Image

Learning Bing Maps API

By : Artan Sinani
Book Image

Learning Bing Maps API

By: Artan Sinani

Overview of this book

Provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines, Bing Maps is a web mapping service powered by the Bing Maps for Enterprise framework. The need for geospatial data has increased dramatically in the last few years. Adding a mapping context to any location-based data is becoming more and more common, and businesses are embracing it to improve their user experience with new data richness. Comprising of simple, follow-along examples, Learning Bing Maps API will show you how to use the many features of Bing Maps, from dropping a simple map on a web page, to fetching geospatial data from the Microsoft servers. Through the course of this book you will build a solid foundation for creating your own geo-applications.Following the hands-on recipes of this book, you will build a different web app in each chapter as you communicate with different APIs provided by Bing Maps. You will build your own library of JavaScript modules that talk to the Microsoft Maps API.You will create a custom theme for the map, with your own controls. Taking advantage of the global reach of Bing Maps, you will learn how to build a route scheduler for a delivery company in Madrid, Spain, and then you will discover how to create jobs on the Bing Maps servers for geocoding addresses in California, USA. By the end of the book you will have learned everything you need to know to embed a map on a web page, with your own geo-data, or data obtained by the Bing Map Services.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Bing Maps REST resources


RESTful services provide their data in form of resources accessible via a URL. The Bing Maps Location API responds with location resources, whereas the other API responses, in JSON, or XML format, contain imagery, route, or traffic information.

The fields returned by the API are quite large, and need to be serialized in other programming languages, such as JavaScript, C# or Ruby. In .NET we can use a collection of DataContracts that correspond to the JSON format of the REST APIs (the latest version of them can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj870778.aspx). We will also use them in our project, so let's copy them to a JsonDataContracts.cs file inside the Models folder.

Now, it's time to write our proxy class that will communicate with Bing Maps; we'll place it inside the Models folder:

public class LocatorProxy
    {
        private const string MAP_KEY = "[YOUR BING MAPS KEY]";
        private const string REST_URL = "http://dev.virtualearth.net...