What is the Bing Maps Platform?
The Bing Maps Platform represents the next evolution of the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform offering, with innovative new capabilities for organizations, governments, and developers. Developers have the flexibility to tap into four Bing Maps APIs: Silverlight Map Control, code built on Silverlight 3; the Bing Map AJAX Control, which lets users make requests via JavaScript to an AJAX map object; Bing Maps Web Services and the MapPoint Web Service API, which uses SOAP XML to communicate with customer applications.