ArcGIS API For Microsoft Silverlight/WPF 2.0 Public Beta Now Available

The ArcGIS API for Silverlight 2.0 Public Beta has now been made available for download. There were a number of demonstrations and sessions at the ESRI Developer Summit 2010 showcasing the ArcGIS API for Silverlight 2.0 and now you can try it for yourself.

Version 2.0 beta of the ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF is now available for download on the new ArcGIS Resource Center.   This is the first public beta release for version 2.0 that supports new features and functionality included with the ArcGIS Server 10 platform.

There are bundles of new features/changes/enhancements in this latest version. Some of these include:

• Silverlight 4. Silverlight 3 No Longer Supported!
  Silverlight 4 introduces major media enhancements, enhanced databinding support to increase flexibility and productivity through data grouping/editing and string formatting within bindings, more comprehensive printing support for screen content, and an extended out of browser experience that supports trusted applications.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 And Microsoft Expression Blend 4
  Tooling support for Silverlight, new in Visual Studio 2010 includes an editable design surface, drag & drop data-binding, integration with Expression Blend styling resources, Silverlight project support, and full IntelliSense. Expression Blend 4 continues to provide an enhanced designer experience for creating effective application interfaces, templates, and animation flows. ArcGIS Silverlight templates are integrated with Visual Studio 2010, Visual Web Developer Express 2010, and Expression Blend 4.

• GraphicsLayers
  A set of new commands and an Editor class enable you select features. With the Select command you can define the spatial selection mode to add new, add to to existing, remove or use keyboard-mouse combinations to select graphics.

• FeatureLayers
  FeatureLayer is a new type of clientside operational layer that can be created and added to your map. FeatureLayer extends GraphicLayer and work against an individual layer or table in a MapService or FeatureService

• Editing
  At ArcGIS Server 10 a new service, FeatureService, was added to support template style editing. Several widgets have been added to support editing including the Editor component, a configurable out of the box editing solution.

• Time-Awareness
  The Map control maintains a time extent property for time aware layers. The ArcGISDynamicMapServiceLayer, FeatureLayer, and ArcGISImageServiceLayer can be time aware if supported by the hosting ArcGIS Server service. A new toolkit control, the TimeSlider provides an easy way to visualize temporal data.

• Other Updates
  Including new geometry task operations, route task operations, image service operations and functionality, as well as WKT support.

Full information on these enhancements and updates can be found here: http://help.arcgis.com/en/…

You can access the online SDK here:

There are loads of samples, concepts and developer reference topics that should help you get started easily.

The ArcGIS API for Silverlight 2.0 is really designed to work against ArcGIS Server 10. While the new features require ArcGIS Server 10, existing features will still work against ArcGIS Server 9.3.1. If you are wanting to take advantage of some of the new features but do not have ArcGIS Server 10 yet, there is a solution:

Many of the new features are designed to work with the forthcoming ArcGIS 10. If you’re not part of the ArcGIS 10 beta program, you can still get a feel for the API using an ArcGIS 10 sample server that ESRI has made available. All the samples in the online SDK use this sample server.

The ArcGIS Server 10 sample server can be found here: http://sampleserver3.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/…

This is a great opportunity to test drive and have a play with the latest ArcGIS API for Silverlight 2.0. The forums is the place to ask questions and interact with others users. You can find this here: http://forums.arcgis.com/forums/…

Rex has posted about this release as well here: http://blogs.esri.com/dev/… As mentioned above it comes packed with loads of new features so give it a go!