It's finally here! A Maps control for Windows! 🗺️
There is a bit of a backstory, gather around, let me tell you all about it. As you know, .NET MAUI uses whatever the underlaying platform provides. For Maps this means, iOS gets Apple Maps and Android gets Google Maps. Unfortunately, for Windows (or rather Win UI) there is no Maps control, so there is nothing on the underlaying platform.
Typically this would mean that the .NET MAUI team can't/won't implement this feature. However, Maps have been around for Xamarin.Forms and it's also something that still has a big audience for iOS and Android. Therefore, it was still implemented but without Windows support. Although that might seem a bit weird, it also makes sense. The .NET MAUI team isn't in the business of creating and maintaining their own controls, they translate everything from the abstract .NET MAUI layer to the platform layer.
To still provide for a .NET MAUI Map control on Windows, we have now implemented Bing Maps through a WebView. All the functionality from the iOS and Android implementation is on Windows with the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit as well: support for pins, zooming, traffic information, etc.
Big shoutout to @rmarinho for starting this, @jfversluis for doing some work but @VladislavAntonyuk mostly for bringing this over the line and getting the PR merged!
Because this has a dependency on the Microsoft.Maui.Controls.Maps package we're delivering the CommunityToolkit.Maui.Maps package as a separate NuGet as well so not everyone will be forced to take on that dependency.
The documentation is already available on the .NET MAUI side: https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/user-interface/controls/map
Enjoy this control and let us know how it goes for you!
Note: currently there is a known bug with this v1.0 version on the Map control if being used with .NET 8 Preview 5 and below. This should be fixed in an upcoming .NET 8 version. For now, use this with the stable version of .NET MAUI.
What's Changed
New Contributors
Full Changelog: 2.0.0-mediaelement...1.0.0-maps