This is part 2 of a series on using the Silverlight Bing Maps Control. If haven’t already, check out part 1.

So Now that you have installed the Bing Maps Silverlight Control, and got yourself a key, you need to add the control to your project. For completeness, lets start by creating a new Silverlight 4 Application Project in Visual Studio 2010, and open up the MainPage.xaml file. Now before we can add the control, we need a reference to it. If you installed to the default location, go the the solution explorer, right click on the References -> Add Reference. Browse to C:/Program Files(x86)/Bing Maps Silverlight Control/V1/Libraries (or similar) and add the two Dlls, Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.dll and Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Common.dll. Now we are ready to add the control.

Now use the following code to add the map control to your xaml:

<m:Map CredentialsProvider=”[your key here]“/>

as well as adding this to your UserControl:

xmlns:m=”clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl”

and your done! Just be sure to replace [your key here] with the actual key from the last tutorial.

Seriously, its that easy to create the simplest Bing Maps Silverlight app. The next step is to make it more interesting, customise it at a bit, and make it more useful.

For more information on creating simple Bing maps in Silverlight (are where I got most of this tutorial info from, what little there is :p ) check out this msdn article.

Over the last month or so I have has the opportunity to develop using the Bing Maps Control for Silverlight, and thought it appropriate to share this experience as well as a bit of a ‘how to’ on using it.

I plan for this to be a bit of a series based on the following items:

• Downloading and Installing the Tools.
• Add a Simple map to your application.
• Using Bing Services
• Customising the Map Control
• Using Custom MapTileSources

Hopefully I will cover these off over the next few weeks. So to begin, lets start with the Downloading and Installing all the required files and tools. I will assume you already have Visual Studio 2010 Full or Express, and have installed the Silverlight Tools .

If you just want a quick preview of what is possible and what the control can do, or just feel liking playing with the bing maps control, head to the Bing Maps Website and play around with the Silverlight version (not the javascript one), and check out a few of the Map Apps.  Everything you see there is achievable with the Maps Control, some of it just requires more work than others. For a more developer centric view of this control, and some code samples and such, check out the Bing Maps Silverlight Control Interactive SDK, which is similar to the Silverlight Toolkit Demo. Both support Out-Of-Browser installation for convenience.  This is a great way to familiarise yourself with what this control can do.

To install the control, head to the microsoft download page to download the Bing Maps Silverlight control installer. Run this and follow the instructions to install. This gives you the required dlls as well as as some documentation in the form of  a chm file.

To use the Bing Maps Control, you need to provide it with a key. This key is an identifier for your application, and allows for tracking usage. Without a valid key, your control wont function.  First things first, create a Bing Maps Developer Account. Head to the Bing Maps Account Center at https://www.bingmapsportal.com. Simply click the Create button to create a new Windows Live User. If you already have a windows live account, use the Login button instead. Follow the instructions to create an account, entering all the required information. After entering your account details such as name and email, and accept the Terms of use.  Once all that stuff is out of the way, you can create a new key using the ‘Create or view keys’ Task on the left menu.  Enter the details and follow instructions to produce your shiny new app key for your map. I would suggest using the Developer or Evaluation/Trial Application Type for the purposes of following this series, or else whichever options suit your purposes best. This key will help record the usage of your control which can be monitored and reported on using the Usage Reports. There is more information on this here.

So thats everything we need to set up to get started on using the Control! For more information about the Bing Maps Silverlight Control, check out the documentation online, specifically the pages for getting a key, and information about using the key.

Next I will go over using your newly downloaded control and key to add a Bing Map to your Silverlight application.

So you’ve built up your nice new fancy custom control, and some Dependency Properties for your users to bind there data to, what else could you want? How about validation?

Turns out that the control base class is all ready set up for this exact scenario. There is only one step required: Create the Visual states. Just add a visualstategroup called ValidationStates and a state for each of Valid, InvalidUnfocused and InvalidFocused corresponding to how you want your control to behave when in each of those states. You can even add these attributes into your class cs file to aid in blending your control:

[TemplateVisualState(GroupName = "ValidationStates", Name = "Valid")]
[TemplateVisualState(GroupName = "ValidationStates", Name = "InvalidUnfocused")]
[TemplateVisualState(GroupName = "ValidationStates", Name = "InvalidFocused")]


I suggest checking out how some of your favourite controls are templated for validation, such as CheckBox and TextBox, to build a default template that would fit in with the existing control validation states.

This supports Exception Validation, IDataErrorInfo, INotifyDataErrorInfo including using INotifyDataErrorInfo asynchronously. Of course you need to set up your bindings correctly using the ValidatesOnExceptions=true, NotifyOnValidationError=true binding properties.

One quick Gotcha, that I found when testing this: make sure that you are binding on the property that reports the errors, especially when using the INotifydataErrorInfo. You need to explicitly bind the datacontext to your validation object to get class level validation to trigger the control’s validation. This may be true for textboxes and other built-in controls as well, but I haven’t verified this theory yet.

There is an excellent Whitepaper on validation using INotifyDataErrorInfo at silverlight.net/learn/whitepapers as well as lots of posts around the web, if you take the time to look (or search). Jesse Liberty also has a validation blog as part of a templates and visual states series on his blog, which i referred to when building up my own validation controls and viewmodels using INotifyDataErrorInfo.