WinForms and WPF Map Control - Vector Tile Support (v20.2)

As you may already know, both our WinForms Map and WPF Map controls support vector tiles. For a quick overview of this feature, please refer to the following blog post: WinForms and WPF Maps – Vector Tile Providers (v20.1). Briefly, our Map Control for WinForms and WPF now supports a set of vector tile providers and a predefined set of vector styles. 

We would like to thank everyone who shared their feedback about vector tile support over the last 6 months. Our development team worked hard to enhance this capability in our v20.2 release cycle. Among the most popular user requests was the visualization of vector tile labels. With our upcoming release, both our WinForms and WPF Map Controls can display labels oriented along polylines. In the following image, street names are rendered in this manner: 

Another useful enhancement is related to fractional zoom levels and overscaled tiles. In v20.2, vector tiles are no longer scaled like raster images – our Map Control uses a new vector scaling method. You can clearly see the difference between images produced at the fractional zoom level (in this example, zoom level = 13.7). The first screenshot was created with v20.1, while the second illustrates the new scaling method introduced in v20.2: 

v20.1: 

v20.2: 

In certain situations, vector tile providers do not return vector tiles with a zoom level higher than a predefined value. In this instance, vector providers recommend that you rescale tiles from the maximum zoom level based on the current map zoom level. This technique is called “overscaled tiles.” As you may have guessed, our Map Control now supports this capability. To appreciate the benefit of this feature, check out the screenshots below. They illustrate the difference at a zoom level of 17 when the tile provider only supports tiles up to 14: 

v20.1: 

v20.2: 

As you can see, our Map Control can now render a much smoother image.

All of these features are automatically available for both WinForms and WPF. You do not need to modify your source code to incorporate this functionality into your app.

Should you have any questions or require additional information on these features, please post your comment below.

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