This was first presented to me as the "Marshall islands bug": our Silverlight application was opening the Google map in the middle of the Pacific, where it should be showing the mid-Atlantic. Looking closely to the map, I found this extraordinary name: Tabukiniberu, an island in the Pacific near the Equator (the Marshall islands are farther to the north). So what on Earth (literally) was my code doing to spin half the globe and show this (hopefully) beautiful island?
The SL4 app I've been working for in the last 6 months uses both Bing and Google maps AJAX controls due to the different quality of the map content. Google maps are way better on some regions where our business is growing, like Africa and Eastern Europe. On the code side, Bing seems to be better.
When there is nothing to display on the map, the application usually centers on point (0, 0) with a zoom level of 2, providing the "classic" (for my European patterns) wold view with Europe on the top right and the Americas to the left. When there is something to display, the code pans and zooms in to the area of interest so that all pushpins are shown. This particular bug occurs in Google maps code when you call fitBounds on an empty LatLngBounds variable (I mean, initialized but without any added bounds). Instead of showing the mid-Atlantic, you are thrown on a 180 degree spin around the globe to a place very close to Tabukiniberu. Well, at least on the map...
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