The Bing Team announced today that they’re releasing beta version of a new tool for developers that will allow them to improve the quality of apps written in Microsoft’s design language, Metro. Bing Maps SDK for Metro style apps will enable developers to add the latest road maps, bird’s-eye views, and low-angle high-res images to their apps.
The announcement comes on the heels of last week’s debut of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 8. As Senior Program Manager of Bing Maps, Dan Polivy, explains,
With the new SDK, we’re now providing a JavaScript control specifically intended for use within your JavaScript apps. This new control is based on our AJAX v7 control, and thus shares a very similar API, but it’s also been enhanced to work within the local app context. For this beta release, you’ll find support for all of the same map types, pushpins, polylines/polygons, infoboxes, and tile layers as AJAX v7, plus the addition of the Venue Maps module. (Directions, traffic, overlays, and other modules are not yet available, but you can still render data provided by our REST APIs.)
Additional features include flexibility among programming languages so that developers more familiar or who simply prefer C#, C++, or Visual Basic as well as an updated licensing term. The new licensing model aims to give developers much more fluidity in constructing and testing Metro style apps on the current Consumer Preview of Windows 8.
The folks at Bing provided assorted samples in C# and Javascript to help demonstrate how developers can integrate Bing Maps into Metro style apps, which can be found on the MSDN Code Gallery.