14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has updated the Bing Maps Account Center as well as the Bing Maps REST Services and is also providing refreshed documentation to developers.
In addition to expanding the Bing Maps Account Center capabilities, the software giant has also worked to enhance the performance of the service. Moreover, it’s now simpler than ever to create a Bing Maps Key, provided that the video tutorial offered by Microsoft is put to good use.
Customers leveraging the Bing maps platform will now be able to enjoy streamline management of location data sources. According to Microsoft the latest enhancements introduced to the account center make possible a range of tasks without requiring the re-uploading of the entire data source.
Microsoft notes that Bing Maps devs will be able to perform a variety of actions which they couldn’t do before the refresh to the account center, including: “[to] add or create a new dataset record in an existing data source; edit Data Sources Schema and upload Tab of Pipe delimited data source files. “
The Bing Maps REST Service was also kicked up a notch. “The Bing Maps REST Imagery Service has had an additional parameter added to it that now allows you to generate static map images with the pushpins de-cluttered. To use this new feature simply add one of the following to your REST call: “declutterPins=1” or “dcl=1”,” the company added.
As I’ve mentioned at the start of this article, developers can also start taking advantage of updated documentation for Bing Maps. This is valid not only for the refreshed Bing Maps Account Center Help documentation, but also for additional resources, published on MSDN.
“Code samples were added the Bing Spatial Data Services Query API that show how to use the query API in C# and VB,” Microsoft said, adding that there are now two new cross platform API articles available: Show Bing Results on a Map and Show Spatial Data Search Results on a Map.