Introduction

In today’s energy and climate crisis, prices for energy such as natural gas for heating and electricity have risen significantly in recent years, with prices at least two to three times higher than in past decades. This is particularly true in Europe, where affordable natural gas from Russia is currently not available. The price of electricity is also closely linked to the price of natural gas, so even when clean electricity is generated through wind, solar, and nuclear power, the price is still higher than what we are used to. This is due to the demand for and availability of electricity, which is typically high during the day and in the evening, but low during nighttime. When there is no wind or sun, electricity is generated by gas, coal, and lignite power plants, which is harmful to the environment. The mix of energy and the linked gas price drives up our energy bills.

While Azure Maps is known for great use cases around visualizing and interacting with a map and location data, you probably also need secure and reliable storage for that data that offers the flexibility to query your (location) data. In this blog post, we explore the different options for storing and querying geospatial data in Azure, including Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Blob Storage. Storing and querying geospatial data in Azure is a powerful and flexible way to manage and analyze large sets of geographic information.

Azure Maps is more than just a Map on your website. It is a complete enterprise solution for location-aware solutions. For example, you can do (reverse) geocoding of customer addresses and use an isochrone to find out withs customers a close to your store or get weather conditions for all your past sales data to know withs products sell best by rain or hot weather or get the correct time-zone for your customer by translating an IP-address to a location and get the time-zone information, or you need to know what the travel time is between two or more locations. So many scenarios and use cases you can make location aware with Azure Maps.

Enhancing your Azure Maps with a custom WebGL layer opens up a realm of possibilities for rendering dynamic 2D and 3D data. While Azure Maps provides a robust set of built-in features, there are times when you may require a more tailored solution. This is where the power of a custom WebGL layer shines.

WebGL, a cross-platform and royalty-free web standard, empowers you to harness low-level 3D graphics right in your web browser. By utilizing WebGL, Azure Maps gains a performance edge, surpassing the capabilities of standard HTML canvas rendering. However, it’s important to note that WebGL’s low-level nature adds complexity and may not always align with straightforward business solutions.

Introduction

One of the requirements when building a business application, which may give access to private business data, is that only authenticated employees or agents be able to see that data. So how can you use Azure Maps in combination with authentication and authorization to ensure only the people that should be allowed have access?

Our Azure Maps docs describe in detail many different authentication scenarios but the complexity can make it seem difficult to implement. This blog post will focus on our most requested authentication scenario for Azure Maps. Use the following step by step guidance to have a .NET web application embedded Azure Maps web control where only authenticated users can see the website and use the map.

Introduction

When using Bing Maps for Enterprise in your solution/application, you need a Basic Key (limited free trial) or an Enterprise key to use the services. For example, you would add a Bing Maps Key to the script URL loading the Bing Maps Web Control like this:

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<script src="https://www.bing.com/api/maps/mapcontrol?callback=GetMap&key={your bing maps key}"></script>

Now your key is open text on your site source code and people who look can find and use your key. Search engines will index your page and, as a result, will also store your key. Is this a problem? Not really.

The Azure Maps Power BI Visual provides a rich set of data visualizations to enhance your data with location context. In the March release of Power BI, the Azure Maps visual introduces two new tools: Geocoding capabilities and a Pie Chart layer.

Geocoding in Power BI

When dealing with data that has a location context, such as addresses or other geographic information, you might lack the precise point location (latitude-longitude) needed to plot these addresses on a map. The new geocode capabilities in the Azure Maps Power BI visual allow you to convert address data into location data directly within Power BI. The Azure Maps geocoder is flexible and can work with incomplete address information or spelling mistakes. Additionally, it supports regional geocoding for various levels, including country, state or province, city, county, postal code, and partial address data.

Azure Maps Weather Services, which became generally available in April 2021, has recently expanded its offerings with three new services: Historical Weather, Air Quality, and Tropical Storms. These additions empower developers and companies to enhance their capabilities when it comes to weather data.

Historical Weather

The Historical Weather API provides actuals, normals, and records climatology data by day for a specified date range, up to 31 days in a single API request. Depending on the location and feature, historical data may be available as far back as 5 to 40+ years. The information includes: