We’re enabling our customers to use Bing Maps and Google Maps in our application through the Map Suite WPF Desktop Edition from ThinkGeo.
To start using these map services in our application, the ThinkGeo API requires either a Bing Maps key, or for Google Maps a client ID and a private cryptographic key.
To get this information, customers must create a developer account with either Google or Microsoft. For Bing Maps, they can generate the key themselves. For Google Maps, they get the client ID and private cryptographic key in a message from Google. When they generate the information, they must register the application they’ll use the map data in.
There are many different APIs, and both Google and Microsoft offer different plans, so we want to be able to offer at least some basic advice to our partners and customers. This includes the following:
- Which Google Maps API and Bing Maps API do users need to get a key for?
- For Bing Maps APIs, you can get a Basic or an Enterprise plan. For Google Maps, you can get a Standard or Premium plan. Does ThinkGeo support both types of plans? It seems like the Basic and Standard plans allow internal use of the API.
- What information does Bing Maps and Google Maps require about our application? The user might need to do some legwork before they start to generate the key.
/Morten