coeus

If you have been using VE Ajax control for a while – like me – then probably you got used to invoking SetMapView method on VEMap class. It accepts an array of VELatLong class and conveniently zooms your map to display a view port large enough to cover all the specified points.

When I switched to using VE Silverlight control for my website I found out that the CTP release of the control didn’t support SetMapView(<array of latlong>) out of the box.

Here is what I had to do to achieve the same functionality:

C# code snippet:

List<Location> allLocationCrumbs = new List<Location>();

// Populate the above defined list

// I had to make server side calls to obtain Json strings, parse them, create location objects and added them to the list

MapViewSpecification mvs = TrailMap.GetViewFromBoundingRectangle(new LocationRect(allLocationCrumbs)); // TrailMap is my local reference to map control
TrailMap.SetView(mvs.Center, mvs.ZoomLevel);

That should do the trick !

I recently started working on a project which involves displaying a large number of spatial points on map. I put together a website which used Virtual Earth’s Ajax SDK v6.2 The Ajax control worked fine in Firefox but the webpage became excruciatingly slow to load and interact with in Internet Explorer. Virtual Earth team released a CTP version of their Silverlight control. All the press coverage sounded promising so I decided to give it a try.

So far I am very pleased with the VE Silverlight control. Zoom, panning has been extremely smooth. I have tested my website in IE on Win7, FireFox on XP and Safari on Mac Mini and the performance is nothing to complain about even when I display over 2k spatial points.