[Solved] Platform Neutral Maps

[Ian]

Hi,

I am have purchased your "Windows 8 XAML" controls and am evaluating the new Map control on my development machine running Windows 8.1 Preview. It took a while to find the download that provided compatibility with Windows 8.1 but after downloading and installing, I finally managed to add a reference to the mapping assembly.

Unfortunately, at this point I received a compiled error stating that the mapping assembly doesn't support the "Any" platform. While I appreciate you have taken a dependency on D2D to provide better ("ultimate") performance, this decision means that developers must maintain a much more complicated compilation/deployment process; one which I would rather not take on.

I have also purchased Syncfusion's "Windows 8 Xaml" controls and their mapping component does not have this requirement. I am therefore wondering whether you will be providing a platform neutral mapping control in the near future or whether consumers of this control will always need to build each platform independently.

Thanks,
  Ian Bebbington

[Giuseppe]

Hello Ian,

At this point we do not plan providing a platform neutral rendering layer for RadMap. While it is true that having a Direct2D dependency complicates the deployment process to some extent, our initial research showed that there are significant disadvantages to performance and user experience with a XAML-based rendering solution that are especially problematic for a visualization control like RadMap. It can easily have to render thousands of shapes (composed of up to a million points) and there is simply no way to visualize this in a usable fashion with XAML layer. Also, the Bing Maps SDK for Windows 8 has the same platform specific requirements and dependencies (most probably for similar reasons).

Hope this helps to clarify our implementation choice for the RadMap control.

Regards,
Giuseppe
Telerik