Creating a Bing Map Tile Server from Windows Azure
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6 min read
[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.]
In this example application, I am going to build a Bing Maps tile server using Windows Azure that draws push pins on the tiles based on coordinates stored as spatial data in SQL Azure. Bing Maps allows you to draw over their maps with custom tiles; these tiles can be generated dynamically from a Windows Azure server. The overlay that this example produces corresponds to latitude and longitude points stored in a SQL Azure database.
There is another option for drawing pushpins, using JavaScript the Bing Map Ajax Controls allow you draw pushpins. However, after about 200 push pins on a map, the performance slows when using JavaScript. So if you have a lot of pushpins, draw them server side using a tile server.
Windows Azure is a perfect solution to use when creating a tile server, since it can scale to meet the traffic needs of the web site serving the map. SQL Azure is a perfect match to hold the latitude and longitude points that we want to draw as push pins because of the spatial data type support.
The tricky part of writing about this application is assembling all the knowledge about these disjointed technologies in the space of a blog post. Because of this, I am going to be off linking to articles about Bing Maps, Windows Azure, and writing mostly about SQL Azure.
Bing Maps
In order to embed a Bing Map in your web page you need to get a Bing Map Developer Account and Bing mapping keys, You can do that here at the Bing Map Portal. Once you have your keys, read this article about getting started with the Bing Maps AJAX control. This is what I used in the example to embed the Bing Map in my web page. Since we are going to build our own Bing Map Tile Server, you will want to read up on how Bing organizes tiles, and the JavaScript you need to add to reference a tile server from an article entitled: Building Your Own Tile Server. Or you can just cut and paste my HTML for a simple embedded map looks like this:
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html xmlns="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>My Virtual Earthtitle> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <script type="text/javascript" src=""> script>