Bing Maps WPF control in OFFLINE mode (MercatorMode)

3
votes

We are investigating the potential use of Bing Maps WPF control in OFFLINE mode (which will be called MercatorMode in the control). OFFLINE mode implies that we download on a desktop machine the tiles for different zoom levels and then the WPF control accesses these pre-saved tiles instead of connecting to the Internet. Technically this scheme works perfectly.

What is unclear right now is how to obtain (download) the tiles without violating any Bing Maps license rules. So it raises two questions:

  1. Whether there exists a way to officially download Bing Maps tiles
  2. Whether it is officially allowed to use the control in the OFFLINE mode (assuming that we’ve got some tiles from some source of tiles)

The legal documentation for Bing Maps is rather confusing than clarifying. So we’d like to ask about the particular experience of other developers.

Our ultimate goal is to have:

  1. a good WPF control for maps (which is a natural WPF control, not just a wrapper over a WinForms control) supporting OFFLINE mode
  2. a legal source of tiles to be used in the OFFLINE mode (costs are not an issue – we are ready to pay for tiles)

Maybe the community would suggest another pair WPF Control + data source for tiles. We do not need any deep level of zooming since we plan to use the control and tiles only for drawing the borders of countries (excluding extremely small countries). Right now we see that Bing Maps as a data source also supports Bing Maps WPF control, but the licensing terms are a real mess.

PS We are developing an “in-house” desktop application which will be used internally in our organization while the Bing Maps license never explicitly references desktop applications while mentioning web-applications and Windows Store. Does anybody know whether Microsoft intentionally doesn’t mention the desktop applications?

3
c#bing-maps
How about OpenStreetMap? It's not Bing, but it's free. – user3449857
What is the most reliable WPF control for OpenStreetMap? Does OpenStreetMap allow downloading tiles? – user2734153
telerik.com/products/wpf/map.aspx – Dean Kuga

3 Answers

3
votes

None of the Bing Maps controls can be used offline. This is against the terms of use. MercatorMode is not an offline mode, this is just a mode which all the standard map views inherit from and which you can use to have a blank background to a custom tile layer. The Map control will always need to have access to the internet otherwise it will not be able to authenticate the map. When it can't authenticate the map an error is thrown. You can handle this error such that it disables the map instead of crashing the app by using the following code sample: http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/bing-maps-wpf-internet-connection-issue/

For an offline map control solution take a look at GMap.NET: http://greatmaps.codeplex.com/

1
votes

Telerik has a nice Map control which supports:

  • Rich geographical context for large volumes of data
  • Heat maps
  • Multiple tile layers
  • Multiple Map Providers

Support for Bing Maps, OpenStreetMaps, custom map providers, as well as visualization of geospatial data.

1
votes

You can try https://greatmaps.codeplex.com/ which works fine in WPF/Offline mode. First you may have to use their application to download the desired maps at all zoom levels. The maplets are stored in SQLLite database which you may consume in your WPF application. The entire source code along with the map control in WPF is also available there.