From the Silverlight Team...

Well we made it to beta one! We have had a great time developing this first Silverlight Edition beta and we hope you enjoy working with it. As this is the first beta, I wanted to take a little time to explain our goals and vision for the product.

Silverlight marks an important point in Microsoft's development platform history, as we finally get to write .NET code on the web client! All I can say is, it's about time and goodbye ActiveX. As general developers we have been waiting for this for a long time, and as GIS developers we can finally give our poor overworked server a little break from rendering maps.

When we started planning the Silverlight Edition, our goal was to be able to do anything you could do in our Desktop Edition with the Silverlight Edition in a browser. This meant we needed to be able to do client side drawing in a very real way. To this end, we ported our Core name-space so you have access to almost every class we have in the Desktop Edition, from Stye to FeatureSource, and the ones you do not have we are working on. This gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to doing your own drawing on the client side and supporting client local data. It also allows you to port code you may already have written for another Map Suite edition. There have been some bumps along the way with Silverlight and specifically isolated storage being slow; however, our design is for the long term and Microsoft already has plans to speed this up in a future release.

With Silverlight Edition, we also wanted to offer a disconnected and centralized data model like the Web Edition. If you choose to have the client be thin, we have to do that just as well. To accomplish this, we offer WMS support along with plans for WMTS and WFS very soon. We also included a very raw but useful Connector class that allows you to easily have the server generate the images to be consumed by the client without having to have a WMS server. The coding style will be very similar to that of Map Suite Web Edition. We will be enhancing this connector to allow you to post back to the server quickly and easily to store state or do whatever else you need.

In a nutshell, we wanted the best of both worlds. You pick: thin client, thick client, or somewhere in between. I am excited about the future of the Silverlight platform and about working on all the neat things we have planned for Beta 2. I invite everyone to check out the discussion forum for the Silverlight Edition and start posting your questions, comments, accomplishments, or heartaches. It is your line directly to us and we are interested in your stories and opinions.

Thank you for checking out our new Silverlight Edition.

We want your feedback...

We invite any constructive feedback you have on the Silverlight Edition Beta. Microsoft Silverlight is still an emerging technology, especially as applied to GIS, and we want your feedback to make Silverlight Edition the best offering in the industry. You can let us know what you think by sending an e-mail to support@thinkgeo.com or by posting in our popular discussion forums.

You have a special opportunity to mold and shape this product; take advantage of the chance!

What we are working on next...

There are a number of things we were not able to get into this beta but which we will be working towards in the next one.

• Replace DeepZoom control: We currently use the Silverlight DeepZoom control; however, this has many limitations and we are in the process of developing our own control that will allow us to integrate many advanced features.
• GeoStyles Integration: We will be enhancing our default GeoStyles that come with the control.
• Animations: We will be including many more animations including panning, zooming, editing, track shape drawing and more.
• Client Side Drawing: We will be enhancing our client side drawing system, specifically increasing the speed of the in-memory data store so you will be able to quickly render local shape files more quickly.
• More Layers: We will be adding support for Virtual Earth, Google Maps, WFS, and other layers from our other editions.
• Enhanced Samples: We will be adding more samples and enhancing existing ones. This will include more samples on animations, projection and client side drawing.
• Connector Enhancements: We plan to greatly enhance our connector control to allow you to post back easily to the server side, so as to persist state and other useful things.
• Improved Sample Framework: We will improve our sample framework to break it out to multiple Silverlight applications to decrease load times and make it generally better.