Comments on: Bing Maps’ New Beta: Interesting, Promising, Erratic

By: swami_worldtraveler

swami_worldtraveler — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:48:46 +0000

@Nate: Haha, funny meeting you here:) See you ’round…

By: Nate Lawrence

Nate Lawrence — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:45:08 +0000

Sporkinum, it is a little more complex than that. The Bing Maps Beta is a Silverlight 3 app and Moonlight is as of this writing still only Silverlight 1 compatible. See http://go-mono.com/moonlight/ for details.

They are super close to finishing Silverlight 2 compatibility but the beta has been lingering right before the finish line for about three months now. See http://go-mono.com/moonlight-beta/ for details.

As I understand it, the Moonlight team has even been building some Silverlight 3 components into the Moonlight 2 beta (see http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/May-04.html for more information), but they will have to finish Moonlight 3 (full Silverlight 3 compatibility) before you can load the Bing Maps Beta with Moonlight.

I have been very frustrated at this game of catch up for some time now as Novell was to have finished Moonlight 2 in September and Photosynth.net was still using a Silverlight 2-based viewer in September. Since then, though, the Photosynth team has rewritten their viewer as a Silverlight 3 app (which truly did need to be done for performance reasons) which puts Moonlight users that much further away from being able to participate in the Photosynth community.

Again with Silverlight 4 already being in beta and promising huge gains in performance (at least for out of the browser apps running with full trust which enables full GPU acceleration) I suspect that the Bing Maps team will want to rewrite their control to take advantage of Silverlight 4′s capabilities ASAP. (Reading over the number of reviews which say that the Bing Maps Beta runs slowly on their machines, I’m guessing the Bing Maps team will want to move to Silverlight 4 as soon as it is stable.) This of course means that Moonlight users will suffer a similar fate with Bing Maps as they have so far with Photosynth UNLESS the Linux community steps up and helps Novell speed up the development of Moonlight OR unless Microsoft develops its own Linux version of Silverlight proper. For many reasons I think that Novell developing Moonlight as an open source Silverlight clone is probably a better fit for the Linux community, but there have been rumours of Silverlight proper coming to Moblin Linux. (See here for more details: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4051 .)

By: sporkinum

sporkinum — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:45:51 +0000

I hit it using Firefox with the moonlight plugin. Microsoft boots you out if you aren’t using their flavor of Silverlight. Might be understandable as a beta, but if they are trying to get people to use Silverlight technology, they are going to have to open it up to moonlight as well.

By: Google/Bing: Minimalism vs. Maximalism | Technologizer

Google/Bing: Minimalism vs. Maximalism | Technologizer — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:14:07 +0000

[...] rising star. In the morning, I attended a Bing press event. It was highlighted by the debut of a feature-packed new version of Bing Maps, but also included demonstrations of how you can get weather reports from three different providers [...]

By: James Webster

James Webster — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:40:06 +0000

Dude, the technology is called ‘Silverlight’ not ‘SilverLight’.

I agree its a little beta, trying it out myself crashed Firefox; which is either Firefox or the Silverlight plugin’s fault.

Still looks pretty impressive though… as someone who is interested in Silverlight development I would be very impressed if they come up with some kind of plug-in model to have my own Silverlight code run within Bing Maps.

By: Nate Lawrence

Nate Lawrence — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:20:37 +0000

Unfortunately your following question contains false thinking and invites others to join you in it:
“So is there any benefit from Bing Maps’ use of SilverLight, versus Google Maps, which depends on open-standard AJAX programming techniques and doesn’t require any browser plug-ins?”

A: Google Street View uses Adobe Flash which is as much a plugin as they get. Near ubiquity does not change the fact that it is a plugin.

B: The primary Bing Maps site remains an AJAX app and I simply can’t imagine them thoroughly deprecating it in favor of a Silverlight-only offering.