Is there a free map control?

I want to develop something with a control like this : Bing Maps Control

Is there so开发者_开发技巧mething advisable and for free ?

Preliminarily I will use it for education but later on It's gonna be for production.

The Bing Maps Control is free as far as I know. But, if you want to use arbitrary tile sources, try Deep Earth

There are several consideration based on your needs.

1. Do you want to use a commercial control and platform?

If you want to use a commercial platform (like Bing Maps), you have to look at the various licence options that are associated to the platform. Take a look at the various licence type so you can get the appropriate one if you want to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff428642.aspx

Also, if it's used in an education use case at the first place, you can see in the Terms of Use if you can fall in this case: http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/terms.html

When moving to production, you will be able to use the control for free for a limited period, limited transactions and depending on your use case (see the licence link and please report to the Terms of use to see if your case fits in the free commercial licence).

2. Do you want to use a specific technology?

If you really want to use the Silverlight control, you can take a look at the DeepEarth project on CodePlex, see here: http://deepearth.codeplex.com/ or you can consider to get inspiration from this project and develop your own extension based on the MultiScaleImage control of Silverlight.

If you don't want to use a particular technology (plugin), you might consider using the Leaflet library to display the map: http://leafletjs.com/

In every cases here, you might consider having some additionnal cost to get access to tiles (Bing's, OSM hosted tiles or whatever service) might require licence to get access to the tiles in your control. You could use your own server to host your own generated tile.

We used this and it worked well for us since we were looking for a zooming/panning solution, but not for maps.

There is an open project www.openstreetmap.org, and I think that it is in long term best choice. You can install data for whole world or just countries you need on your server, there is accurate data update ... Or you can use maps from main server, get embeddable HTML etc.