Virtual Earth Control URLs Changing
To provide a stable and predictable set of tools for our developers through the future, we are moving the all controls for Virtual Earth to a new location. The original control locations will be retired in the coming weeks to prepare for changes required by the Windows Live Local announcement. Updating your applications now will prevent these changes from impacting your applications and ensure future changes have minimal impact as well.
The Standard Control, previously available at https://virtualearth.msn.com/js/MapControl.js, will be moved to a new home here:
The current version of the Commercial Control is also being migrated to the new location. The new location of the files referenced in the Commercial Control SDK (which will be updated shortly to reflect the changing URLs) are now:
https://dev.virtualearth.net/commercial/v1/VE_MapSearchControl.js
https://dev.virtualearth.net/commercial/v1/VE_MapSearchControl.css
If your application references the old URLs, it is important that you update it as soon as you can to avoid changes to the Virtual Earth URL related to the Windows Live Local announcement from affecting your application. The controls hosted at the new location are the same controls you are currently using, just hosted elsewhere—no other changes should be needed to your code base.
If you have downloaded the control and are hosting it locally (not recommended), you should update your application to reference the new location as a static script reference in your application or it may also break when the old URL is retired.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes; however, it is a necessary step in providing a stable, predictable developer platform moving forward. As is true for many beta products, especially those built for developers, Virtual Earth is going through these changes to provide a more stable infrastructure than our earlier preview code provided. As always, we will strive to minimize breaking changes, provide sufficient notification of those changes, and generally provide a good experience for our developers. We thank you for your commitment to the Virtual Earth development platform, and look forward to sharing all the advances we are making with you and your customers.
Alex Daley
MapPoint Technical Evangelist
Update 1: If you are using the Standard Control and directly referencing the file "ve.js" on our servers in order to utilize the navigation controls, you will need to download and host that control locally to your site before the original control URLs are retired--it will not be hosted on dev.virtualearth.net. I realize this is in direct contrast to the instructions about referencing the hosted controls on our servers, but this is a result of a design change instituted afte this first version was released. As with the current commercial control, going forward, navigation controls will be embedded in the Map Control for simplicity.
Comments
Anonymous
January 26, 2006
After working happily for some week or two, the Virtual Earth maps have stopped working. I have used the method described in 'Computer Shopper' (Jan 2005) and found it a very useful service from Microsoft but why is it not reliable? The URL I am using is http://www.svrsig.org/cgi-bin/gemap.cgi and a sample is at http://www.svrsig.org/GEMap
Help please!Anonymous
January 26, 2006
Re earlier comment, it appears that the links http://dev.virtualearth.net/standard/v2/MapControl... are not working and using a local copy of the css and js files works fine. The links above (as mentioned in the Computer Shopper article) must therefore be regarded as unreliable and local copies of the js and css files should be used.Anonymous
January 26, 2006
The second link in my original comment should read:
http://www.svrsig.org/GEMap.htm Sorry!Anonymous
May 04, 2006
When we transitioned to Windows Live Local we implemented new servers for the tiles for vector,...Anonymous
April 02, 2007
Do you know how can buy the license for user VE for commercial use ? i didn't found none online... thank you sietaa@gmail.comAnonymous
June 13, 2008
Just quick but important reminder note: Now that Windows Live Local has launched, if you are referencing