One of the most powerful features is the Silverlight map control's ability to bind properties of its map elements to columns in your shapefile. You can programmatically access these map element properties and/or use them to affect the appearance of your map. For example, you can have a column for the two-letter abbreviation of each U.S. state in your shapefile bound to a property on the map elements you call State Abbreviation and use that information to label the map elements.

You can use data templates in XAML to customize the look of your map elements through the ValueTemplate property.  This allows you to display custom information for each element of the Silverlight map, even in different kinds of controls that you position inside of the template.

Across industries, geographic information systems have seen explosive growth with the accumulation of geospatial data throughout organization's data warehouses. With the Silverlight mapping control you can present this information to your users as easily-read maps that they can dynamically navigate and explore.

Integrate road and satellite images into the map from a variety of data providers including Microsoft Bing Maps, Cloud Made or Open Street Maps.  Map imagery automatically synchronizes with map layers as end users pan and zoom.

Combine the power of the xamMap with the native SQL Server 2008 GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY types by loading shape data directly from your database.  Merge additional SQL fields into map shapes through data binding, and merge SQL Server geospatial shapes into a single map control together using layers.

Users can pan the map by dragging the navigation pane rectangle, or by "drag panning" with their mouse, by using the arrow keys.

The Silverlight map control is equipped to read de facto standard shapefiles (*.shp file extension) in this popular geospatial data format that contains point, polyline and polygonal shape data as map layers. There are many publicly-available geographic resources from which you can readily obtain shapefiles in this format, and there are free converters that will transform other GIS data formats such as KML into shapefile format. What this means is that you have a world of maps at your fingertips, and to which your application can add value.

Users can zoom-in to (and zoom-out from) the Silverlight map with the Page Up/Page Down keys on their keyboard, or by dragging their mouse while holding down the Shift key.