Bing Maps in windows 10 with wpf aplication or WinForm application

Question

Hi, 

my development machine is windows 10,

I can download a Bing map for offline use in Maps Application of windows 10, and I tried creating a UWP application and can also use offline map in that application, but can I use this offline map feature in WPF application or winform application(right now my application is in winform but I can switch to WPF).

so if I can use Bing maps in offline mode in WPF or Winform application, my requirement is I want a map image from a lat long for a particular zoom level, so I can use that image to generate report(PDF) and also to print that report in black and white. I tried printing bing maps in black & white but colours got faded and print quality is not good so can I also manage map's colour or is there any theme which can print viewable black and white maps.

Thanks & Regards

Amit Rawat 

Answer 1

Hi Rawat,

I believe this questions was already answered by RBrundrit in StackOverflow here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22766232/bing-maps-wpf-control-in-offline-mode-mercatormode/22788996#22788996

Have you tried using the mapping feature in Excel (Office)?  That does support reporting and I think Word will save to PDF.

Sincerely,

IoTGirl

Answer 2

There are a couple of features that are relevant to your scenario.

The first is custom map styles. You can customize the look and feel of the map easily with this API and create a map style that will have high contrast and print well in Black and White. See this sample for documentation.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/maps-and-location/elements-of-map-style-sheet

There is also an app available to make creating your custom map style easy.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/map-style-sheet-editor/9nbhtcjt72ft?rtc=1#activetab=pivot:overviewtab

The new feature you should be aware of is XAML Islands. Starting with the October update of Windows which should be available shortly, you can embed any UWP control in desktop WPF apps, including the UWP map control. There should be a community toolkit update shortly to make this even easier.