fignewtron was here

Yesterday, we released an update to a features guide about bing.com.  This was a really fun project that took some time and the efforts of several people to complete.  There is some attention being drawn to the new features in bing.  This morning, a search on Bing.com for "discover bing" returned the updated site as the 2nd result.  I saw the same ranking on Google too ;)  There was a surprising article from All Things Digital that even embedded three feature videos from the new site. 

The site is located here. Below is a screen shot of the site.  I have to say that I really enjoyed working with the designer on this project.  The look and feel that he created was exceptional and I think there was even more he was able to design that was just outside the realm of what we could capture in the final application.  Still, with great design, Silverlight 3 was the right tool to bring it to life.  Check out the animations when the site loads, on hover of the buttons, when you click on a feature button, and the slider animation that goes from one feature to the next.  We captured some very intuitive ways to get from point A to point B in this application.

Silverlight

I'm very excited to hear that there is a Silverlight control for Bing maps!  Here is the link to MSDN documentation. It was just announced at TechEd Europe yesterday!!!!  Here is more on that news.  It takes less than 15 minutes to get up to speed on using the maps control.  I've had some experience creating map control in ASP.Net using Google Maps.  The implementation is similar but even easier to use.  Google requires that you register using a gmail account and a valud URL.  They give you a key for a specific URL, which limits you to registering your development environment localhost:{port}.  Bing maps for Silverlight allows you to register to get up to 5 keys and does not limit you to your development URL.

If you are writing anything in Silverlight, you have to check this out! http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/announcing-the-bing-maps-silverlight-control/

Code, Silverlight silverlight