Hey everyone, Angus Logan here. I’m the technical product manager across all of the Live Platform APIs.
Today we’re refreshing the Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (CTP). Over the past few months we’ve fixed lots of bugs and made sure the controls are up to date… but what I’m super excited about is the addition of the Microsoft Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control.
The Windows Live™ Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 are a set of control add-ins to make incorporating Windows Live services into your Web application easier with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008.
You can download the controls from here and we would love your feedback.
We now 6 controls you can easily drag into your ASP.NET web applications:
Update: Check out this video on Channel 9 where Mark Brown and I demo the control:
Let’s drill into the Virtual Earth control a little. Previously you needed to reference JavaScript and write a bunch of front-end code to get your maps working. This control allows ASP.NET developers to add maps to their site without writing any JavaScript, and they can keep the great client side interactivity by combining this with ASP.NET AJAX.
After installing the Windows Live Tools you get a new toolbox group:
The control is added to your page:
You can drag the Map control onto the canvas and you get a rich design surface:
You can also configure the map modes, default location and many other things via the Properties pane:
All of the map manipulation etc. can be done using ASP.NET code behind:
Aside from displaying geographic information, you can also work with server side events. So as the map is manipulated, it can fire events which in turn run ASP.NET code, all without writing any JavaScript!
The Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio are still a community technology preview. Download them now and we’d love to hear your feedback.