VCL Map Control (Coming soon in v14.1)

With the beta for VCL 14.1 ready, it’s time to talk about another new control in the DevExpress VCL 14.1 Subscription: the Map Control.

OK, one basic scenario is as follows: you have a sales app that shows information about previous sales and sales opportunities in a particular area. You’d like to be able to show a map of those opportunities so that your sales people can concentrate on the best opportunities and their locations within that region. This is an ideal candidate for the new DevExpress VCL Map Control.

Here’s an example showing a pin for the DevExpress Offices in Glendale, CA. Things to note here include the pin and associated text (it’s actually on a separate layer whose background becomes opaque when the mouse hovers over it); the map controls that include a zoom bar, a navigation button, and text showing the scale and the location of the center of the map; and the use of Bing Maps as the provider.

Here’s the same map, but this time the provider is OpenStreetMaps.

And here it is again, but as a hybrid map, using image tiles from Bing.

Now, with this control there are some caveats to its use. First of all, the map tiles provided by Bing Maps and OpenStreetMaps is licensed separately from the DevExpress VCL Subscription; we do not confer any rights to use of the map data from these providers. If you use this Map Control, you will have to license the map data from either Bing Maps or from OpenStreetMaps. (For Bing licensing details, go here. For OpenStreetMaps licensing details, go here and here.)

The other caveat is that the Map Control only supports RAD Studio 2010 or later (and hence, in particular, there is no support for Delphi 7 or 2007).

As usual, if you have any questions, comments or feedback, please don’t hesitate to email me at julianb@devexpress.com.

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