Work has started again on developing the excellent GMaps.Net Control, originally developed in October 2005 by Bill Pierce. The GMaps.Net Control is "a custom server control wrapper for the Google Maps API. Developed for ASP.Net using C#, JavaScript, and XSL. The GMap control makes using Google Maps easy for .Net developers; allowing them to interact with Google Maps using standard .Net language."

What does it do?
If you are a web developer who makes ASP.NET web pages, you might have been tempted to add Google Maps to your website. But that means messing about with Javascript and other such Client side code. But what happens if you want to link it in with some of you ASP.NET code?
Things start to get a little messy, and this is where GMaps.Net Control arrives on the scene.
It allows you to simple add Google Maps by using a control, like you would do with a button to your webpage. It's as easy as that!

The Story So Far
The original control was created by Bill Pierce and published alongside his excellent articles on Code Project in October 2005. The articles describe how to use the control and explaining some of the inner workings in slightly more detail. The article is in 4 parts and can be found on these pages:
part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4

The articles were published in October 2005, and at that time the control worked with the original (version 1) Google Map API. In the meantime the Google rolled out version 2 and created a lot of changes, which effectively made the Control obsolete.

We believe the control is an extremely useful tool for .Net developers, and felt that it should be worked on by the Open Source Community. (The control was originally released under a Mozilla GPL v.1.1).

As of 17th August 2006, the original code was released on Sourceforge.net as the "GMaps .Net Control" project : http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmapdotnetctl

The Road Ahead
So now we need to upgrade the control to work with version 2 of the API. This means adding a lot of new functionality to the original control, and we have a very long road ahead. At the moment there is a lot of work to be done and the upgrade is just in it's infancy, and we would be appreciative of any C# developers who would like to add their support!

There is a constantly updated version on Subversion, on the sourceforge project page and we will soon be releasing some files on SourceForge soon (most likely just the original version), but we'll keep you posted.