HomeWinBuzzer NewsMicrosoft Issues Second Bing Maps V8 Monthly Update

Microsoft Issues Second Bing Maps V8 Monthly Update

The latest release for Bing Maps V8 focuses on fixing numerous bugs and also enhancing the overall functionality of the service.

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Bing Maps V8 has scored a new update that brings more features to the service. launched the map suite a few months ago. This release marks the second monthly update for Bing Maps V8 is it was first unveiled. Aside from the new features, the update fixes a slew of bugs and enhances overall performance.

Among the new features animated tile layers. Users can now animate through a number of tile layers. Microsoft has also added a number of new road map styles. Available with this update are grayscale, canvasDark, and CanvasLight map styles.

Microsoft has also refined the DrawingTools system, making it easier to draw shapes and place them on maps. As mentioned, the company has also gone on a bug squashing rampage. Indeed, this update sees over 30 bugs fixed in Bing Maps V8.

map-styles-bing-maps-v8-microsoft-official

Below is the full changelog:

  • Makes it easy to smoothly animate through and array of tile layers. Try it now
  • To make Bing Maps more accessible, high contrast support has been added. When the user's computer is in high contrast mode, a high contrast version of the road maps will be displayed.
  • Three new road map styles have been added; grayscale, canvasDark and canvasLight. These are designed to make it easy to focus on the data you overlay on top of the map and are much better suited for business intelligence type scenarios than the default road map style. You can find documentation here.
  • The infobox class now supports HTML descriptions values. The infobox class also automatically scales to fit it's content. Maximum width and height values can be specified. Try it now
  • By default polylines and polygons are generalized (simplified) when rendered based on the current zoom level. This provides a performance enhancement when these shapes have more than just a few locations in them. If you are working with a lot of simple shapes (i.e. triangles) cosider disabling this feature by setting the generalizable option of the shape to false as this optimization will not provide any benifit in this case.
  • The DrawingTools class has had a number of improvements which make it much easier to create individual shapes and attach events to them.
  • There are two new map options for disabling streetside functionality. The first, disableStreetside, completely disables this feature and removes it as an option in the bar. The second, disableStreetsideAutoCoverage, disables the automatic streetside coverage layer that appears when zoomed in at lower zoom levels.
  • All CSS classes used by the Bing Maps V8 SDK have been namespaced with a MicrosoftMaps namecpace to reduce the likelihood of naming collisions with CSS classes from other libraries.

Bing Maps V8

At the start of last month, Microsoft launched support for TypeScript Definitions in Bing Maps V8. This release means dev's can find problems with Bing Maps in their applications before they become serious. There is no real upshot for end users in terms of any features. It does, however, mean Bing Maps is more likely to work cleanly in an app.

Also in August, the company rolled out the first monthly update for the maps service. Among the new features added were Spatial Math Geology, Dragable Pushpins, Custom Overlays, and more.

Last Updated on January 31, 2017 7:26 pm CET by Luke Jones

SourceMicrosoft
Luke Jones
Luke Jones
Luke has been writing about all things tech for more than five years. He is following Microsoft closely to bring you the latest news about Windows, Office, Azure, Skype, HoloLens and all the rest of their products.

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