Last week we finally released v1.0 RTW of our Silverlight/WPF API. Today at our User Conference in San Diego, Jack Dangermond announced, that it even will be free for non-commercial use. The API will run on both v2 and v3 of Silverlight.

Furthermore today we released the entire source code for the toolkit assembly on CodePlex: http://esrisilverlight.codeplex.com

Also today at the Windows Partner Conference, we announced MapIt, a mapping solution running on a combination of SQL Server 2008, IIS and Silverlight/WPF and also with integration into Sharepoint. You can download a free 60-day evaluation of MapIt today. I encourage you to go see some of the demonstration videos – especially if you are new to GIS, this video could be an eye-opener to what information is hidden in your existing business intelligence.

If you are at the ESRI User Conference this week, come by the Silverlight Island in the showcase area and talk some Silverlight. I’ll be there most of the time Tuesday through Thursday. I’ll also be joining Rex Hansen and Art Haddad at the .NET SIG Tuesday evening, and the Silverlight intro sessions Wednesday and Thursday. Also watch Rich’s Demo Theater session which will demonstrate the ESRI Map Web Part for SharePoint and MapIt (the title on this session is incorrect).

FINALLY we released the beta of our new ArcGIS client API for Silverlight and WPF the end of this week.

You can download the beta here, where you also can find links to documentation and samples. Note that the download requires an ESRI global account, which you can create for free.

Art has the details on his blog.

This his has been (well still is since it's beta :-) a great fun project to work on. We tried to design it to be similar to our JavaScript and Flex APIs, but at the same time make it more ".NET" when it made sense, or taken advantage of capabilities Silverlight had. We really look forward to the feedback from you, as well as talking to anyone who's at the ESRI Developer summit next week. I'll be there Monday through Thursday, mostly hanging out at the showcase area, so if you're there, stop by say hi and get to see the API first hand. Art and Rex will be doing an intro session Wednesday at 1pm, and I'll join them Thursday 10:15am for the advanced session.

Below is a simple flickr application that I created for the api, (source is available for download at the code gallery). Just zoom to any area of interest, hit the flickr button, and images in that area pops up. The sample demonstrates the power of templating the symbols which allows you to associate animations to states of the symbols, as well as using binding. This is really no different than the states model used in other Silverlight controls. The flickr symbols here has two states: MouseOver, which zooms the image and displays a small description at the bottom. The result box to the left uses the selection state when you hover on the features to first scale the image slightly and highlight the border, and if you stay hovering on it, will expand to full size. Click the result to center on that feature.

Well what do you know... I'm also on youtube now. Together with several of our team members I'm demoing a custom renderer from the Code Gallery. Check it out!

Here are the links to the samples:

• Add Data Control
  
• Nik's Flickr Search Task
• Custom Renderers

Other samples that you should check out (because I wrote them :-)):

Utility library: Simplifies ADF development for a number of common tasks. For example add a resource in one line of code, or create a redline tool using only a couple lines of code.

DHTML ScaleBar: Pure client-side scalebar. Instead of using the map services for drawing the scalebar, it uses a pure clientside approach (javascript), removing the need for server requests and scalebar re-rendering. It's also useful for resources that doesn't support rendering scalebars.

If you want know more I'll be working at the Server Showcase at the ESRI User Conference next week as well as demoing some more samples at the .NET SIG.

Art recently promised that there would be an ArcGIS Server Development Blog soon, and now it's there !
Check out our the new blog at http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/arcgisserver/
You can also find a link to the blog from http://blogs.esri.com

And even better! The server is also running ArcGIS Server.NET, so you can see the examples in action!

From the blog:

This blog is written directly by the ArcGIS Server Development Team.  We are very excited about the ArcGIS Server 9.2 release.  We have so much to share with the user community.  Topics will range from detailed programming information ("What is a page life cycle in the Web ADF?") to GIS methodology ("What is the best methodology to produce map caches?") for serving spatial data with ArcGIS Server.  One of the key parts to this blog will be the use of an example site.  We intend to post useful entries for our users which are linked directly to examples that we have built that you can access live from the Internet.

 

Jeremy has already put up a huge post on creating a website with cached tiles and custom tasks, including live running samples you can try.

I just had my first day at ESRI today, where I have joined the ArcGIS Server .NET ADF team.

Everything here seemed well-prepared and set-up when I got there, including a small "seminar" for everyone who started as ESRI today, and ready-installed desktop and laptop computers.

I already got to look "under the hood" of AGS and play around with it - there's definitely some very cool stuff in there! Hopefully I'll get some time to blog some more about it later - or you can have a look at Arts blog as well.