The Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services that combines unique bird’s eye, aerial, and 3-D imagery with best-of-breed mapping, location and search functionality. With ongoing investments in innovation that are driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform 5.0 continues to offer new tools, advanced feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities.

Version 5.0

Improved Support for Feature Customization

• Virtual Earth Shapes. Easily customize and modify pushpins, polylines, and polygons with the new Virtual Earth Shape class. Customize line colors, widths, and transparencies of shapes, as well as add custom icons.
• Info Boxes. Shapes now have associated info boxes which can be shown and hidden as a response to user actions (e.g. clicking on the shape). The info box text and text style are completely customizable.
• Find Method. More customizable find method integrates the new Shape class to find locations and businesses easier than ever before.
• Keyboard and Mouse Events. Override almost any keyboard or mouse event, and use it to execute any Virtual Earth map action.

Rich End-User Experience

• Bird’s Eye Panning. Pan continuously across the map in bird’s eye view.
• Tile Over-fetching. Programmatically enable tile downloading to either increase panning performance or optimize page load time.
• Small Navigation Controls. New options for end users to customize the interface by utilizing two new options for smaller navigation controls.
• Mini Map. The mini map provides a small map legend, giving the user better bearings as he navigates.
• Compressed Map Control. The map control code base is now compressed, reducing the initial download size to around 25% of the original download.
• Programmatic Market Selection. Localized market support, beginning with Japan, which is now supported in the Virtual Earth API

New Level of Control and Flexibility

• Pushpins, Polylines, and Polygons. Once separately-coded objects, the new Virtual Earth shapes are now richer and easier to customize. Move shapes on the fly, show and hide them programmatically, and give them custom icons using your own image or your own HTML.
• GeoRSS Imports. Import pushpins, polylines, and polygons using the GeoRSS feed, which is becoming the de facto standard.
• Info Boxes. Shapes can now store HTML and CSS content for custom info boxes, which can be shown or hidden programmatically.
• Shape Layers. New and improved shape management capabilities allow grouping of pushpins, polylines, and polygons. Show or hide a group of shapes, or make changes to the individual shapes within them.
• Find Method. Easily customize search results with the updated find method which sends the resulting pushpins directly to a shape layer.
• Tile Layers. The tile layer interface, used for adding, deleting, showing, and hiding tile layers, is now more straightforward and easier to use.

View the Interactive SDK to see all the new features. 

Version 4.0

With version 4.0 of the map control, you can now display 3D maps on your Web site. Existing 2D maps will continue to work as they do in version 3 of the control, but now users can switch to 3D mode and view maps in an all-new way.

NoteVersion 4.0 of the map control also includes the latest updates to the version 3.2 map control.

3D Maps

The Virtual Earth map control now supports 3D maps. This is a very significant change, both in terms of user experience and in the way you develop your Virtual Earth applications. To view the 3D maps, each user must install the Virtual Earth 3D control and must have sufficient computer hardware to display the maps. The map control has been updated to provide the APIs you need to get started with the 3D maps. For more information on getting started, see Displaying 3D Maps.

Map View Specification

A new VEMapViewSpecification object has been added that defines the current map view, including the center point and zoom level. If the map is in 3D mode, the map view specification also includes the altitude, pitch, and heading of the view

URL change

The changes included in version 4.0 of the map control require a new URL. To start programming against the latest control, update your script reference to the following URL:

http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v4/mapcontrol.js

Version 3.2

Location Disambiguation

New methods and properties have been added to the VEMap object, which allow you to develop your own custom location disambiguation methods. For more information, see Finding Information.

Version 3.1

Add Custom Tiles

The Virtual Earth map control now supports custom map tiles. You can generate the map tiles by using Working with Tile Layers.

Draw Polygons

A VEPolygon object has been added to the map control. It is very similar to the VEPolyline object, except that it includes a fill color. Using the VEPolygon object enables you to draw shaded polygons with varying degrees of transparency to your map. To learn more, see Drawing Lines and Polygons on the Map.

Disambiguate Addresses

A new VESearchResult object lets you work with returned addresses from a VEMap.Find method call.

Change the Map Scale Bar

A new VEMap.SetScaleBarDistanceUnit method has been added to the control. This method enables you to change the map scale bar units to either miles or kilometers.