Question

I have a Bing Maps control in a silverlight application.

The application is to be deployed on a company network which has a very tight security policy and so they need to know what data is going to be sent/recieved over the connection to the Microsoft servers.

Can anyone point me in the right direction with regards to data connections etc. I understand that the control sends a licence and recieves map tiles but I don’t know how.

Answer 1

The only data that gets sent from the Bing Maps control to Bing’s servers is your application key, which is used to log a transaction recording the start of your session. This is done by a call to the service at http://dev.virtualearth.net/webservices/v1/LoggingService/LoggingService.svc. The service sends back an authentication result code and a session id which is assigned for the rest of the session.

In terms of data received from Bing’s servers to the Map Control – if you use one of the built-in map styles (aerial/road etc.), then the tile images are requested from one of the tile servers in the edge caching network, which have URLs as follows:

http://ecn.t0.tiles.virtualearth.net

http://ecn.t1.tiles.virtualearth.net

http://ecn.t2.tiles.virtualearth.net

http://ecn.t3.tiles.virtualearth.net

That’s it. If you load a tile layer from a local tile source then no content gets transferred from Bing. Nothing ever gets sent to Microsoft relating to any shapes or other data plotted on the map.