For a client we need to integrate Bing maps into our VisualWebGui application.

As far as I know Bing maps is html5 javascript based. There are some asp.net control initiatives but what I like to do is wrap the html jacascript version into a custom control.

I have been looking on how to do this but I am not sure of what is the best approach.

Has anyone done this before? What would be the approach for wrapping Bing maps?

Arco

 Hi Palli,

Have been looking at the Google Maps approach but get the idea it is a bit of a one way control (correct me if i am wrong). What I mean is that you can only show a map, set a location. No interaction back from the map. I tried catching Click and MouseClick events but these are not fired. I see an iFrame is used to show the map. No communication back through the iFrame.

I want my client to be able to set pushpins on a Bing map and draw polygons. The resulting coördinates I want to store in a database.

Any ideas on how to achieve that?

Arco

 Hi Arco,

The GoogleMap implementation here (see the version 6.3 control converted to 6.4 download) is communicating both ways, although it doesn't report many events back to the Visual WebGui application, it does so for the ones it registers on the GoogleMap client side. See for instance the GoogleMap_ZoomChanged() JavaScript method which is invoked by the map control it self and registered within GoogleMap_Initialize. When raised, it will raise a Visual WebGui event which you can process within the FireEvent override of the server-side control and do whatever you need.

As far as I could see in my quick browsing of the BING map JavaScript API, you can indeed register event handlers client-side on the map and as long as the BING map supports raising client-side events for the operations you want to detect, you should be able to get that information to the server-side.

The challenge of wrapping the BING map control, as I see it, is not that you can't make this work, much rather that the API is HUGE and wrapping it all will require a lot of work. 

Hope this explains,

Palli