Do I need to upgrade to accommodate the deprecation of Bing Maps SOAP Web Services and Bing Maps AJAX Control Version 7.0?

Answer

On June 30, 2017, Microsoft plans to deprecate the following Bing Maps controls:

• Bing Maps AJAX Control Version 7.0
• Bing Maps SOAP Web Services

This has led to questions regarding the level of impact for Esri customers utilizing Bing Maps in Esri products. As stated in Microsoft's Bing Maps migration guidelines documentation:

"The Bing Maps AJAX Control Version 7 (AJAX 7) is superseded by the Bing Maps V8 web control (V8). The V8 control supports most of the same capabilities as AJAX V7 and has been extended to include features, such as auto-suggest, heat maps, clustering, increased mobile support, and much more. The V8 control is built on top of HTML5 technology which provides increased performance and the ability to render more data. The core functionalities in the V8 control are largely backwards compatible with AJAX V7 which helps minimize migration efforts in most applications."

Esri customers utilizing Bing Maps should not be affected by this change.

• Map documents or projects in ArcMap and Pro that contain Bing maps are not affected by the migration.
• The ArcGIS JavaScript API utilizes a non-SOAP version of Bing, thus, JavaScript applications are not affected.

SOAP requests may have been seen being logged in Bing Maps Dev Center when utilizing ArcMap. This was due to requests made on the back-end from the Esri VEAdaptor. This issue was fixed and implemented on June 21, 2017. As this was a server-side fix, no action is needed.

Some retired Esri products (such as the Silverlight API and SDK for WPF) previously utilized Bing SOAP Web Services. Customers utilizing retired products are encouraged to explore solutions utilizing currently supported products.