Microsoft Killed the Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control

Yesterday, Chris Pendleton officially announced that the Microsoft Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control is now Dead. Frankly, I’ve considered it “dead” for a long time now since it didn’t get updated much, didn’t have a completely full feature support, has a few bugs AND you couldn’t use it within your applications because it was just a Preview (CTP) anyway.

There are however a few good things to point out in the light of Microsoft killing its Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control:

• The Simplovation Web.Maps.VE Bing Maps ASP.NET AJAX Server Control is Fully Supported and has Regular Updates. Plus you’ve always been allowed to use it within your applications, unlike Microsoft’s control.
• The Bing Maps Silverlight Control is “The Future” for Bing Maps once it finally gets released sometime in the hopefully new future.
• And lastly, it looks like John O’Brien from Soul Solutions is going to be releasing the Microsoft code on CodePlex; however it will NOT be supported and will most likely NOT have regular updates.

If you were previously a fan of Microsoft’s control, then I recommend you check out the Simplovation Web.Maps.VE control. The licensing cost of the Simplovation control is fairly low and sold on a “per developer” basis. A single developer can purchase a single license and then use the Simplovation Web.Maps.VE control within as many (unlimited) applications as he wants/needs. Plus, the Simplovation Web.Maps.VE component can be redistributed along with any of those applications royalty free.

Go check it out: http://simplovation.com

Update 8/23/2009: John has created the **CodePlex* project to contain the source code for Microsoft’s control. *http://bingmapsasp.codeplex.com/