Q: What happens when you cross a Silverlight application with Bing Maps?

A: A full fledged geographical DeepZoom navigation experience.

This is what you get with the new Bing maps Silverlight Control now available from Microsoft. I’ve tested it and I must say its very cool. You can do some great visual “damage” with it, since it supports DeepZoom functionality.

 The Bing Maps Silverlight Control has been in CTP for awhile, but it was now released as version 1.0. Check out a full working example here.

 Some of the features in this release include:

• Deep Zoom Support
• Built on Silverlight 3.0
• Support for Expression Blend
• Out-of-Browser Support
• Data Binding

You can download the SDK here. Make sure you get a developer account, or else you’ll end up with a nag label above your map, like in this quick example:

 This was a simple demo I’ve created in order to test the control. Here’s the code, for what it’s worth:

<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightBingMapsControl.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:Bing="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="50px"></RowDefinition>
            <RowDefinition></RowDefinition>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <TextBlock Grid.Row="0" VerticalAlignment="Center" Padding="10" FontSize="18">.net Brainwork Bing Maps Silverlight Control Example</TextBlock>
        <Bing:Map Grid.Row="1" AnimationLevel="Full"></Bing:Map>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

Deep Zoom Composer has been updated recently and it’s improvements are mainy in the documentation and bug fix areas: “This release was really about fixing the bugs that many of you have found as well as addressing some major shortcomings in the app“.

Here’s what you can expect from this new version:

Improved Memory Handling

Dealing with many high-resolution images on an interactive design surface is a challenge, but Deep Zoom Composer should now allow you to compose more images than you could in the past. The team isn’t quite there yet, so expect future releases to address them in greater detail.

Improved Project Support

For the past few releases, some major changes to the project structure were made and how the DZPRJ files are written and opened. Unfortunately, for some of you, those changes meant your older projects were no longer opening. 

Updated Seadragon Ajax Templates

In the previous release, you got to use Deep Zoom Composer to export your content to Seadragon Ajax. The approach that was used then was to have you upload the JS libraries along with your images to the server. That was a bit messy. In this release, all JS downloading is being deferred to the Live Labs team’s seadragon.com server itself, so you will no longer have to upload a large quantity of JS files.

Numerous Little Fixes

Besides the major changes listed above, many little tweaks were made that are too many to publish and list here. Some of them are bigger such as using an updated version of DeepZoomTools.dll, and some of them are less big like the numerous wording and string changes made.

Source: Deep Zoom Composer Team Blog

Give it a try here.

One of the biggest changes made to the Composer is the new Export UI, witch provides the option of exporting a composition as a Seadragon Ajax project. This will allow you to use the Deep Zoom functionality through javascript.

This version of Deep Zoom Composer is now using a managed DLL instead of the command line tools SparseImageTools.exe and ImageTool.exe. A new project template is also available and numerous bug fixes made.

You can download this new version here.