Choropleth shading allows you to paint map elements with different colors based on their data value. The range of data values can be shown on an accompanying legend, as in the United States population map shown here. The presence of a legend makes it easy for users to approximate the values for map elements from their color-coded shading.
Choropleth
This auto sales dashboard highlights the capabilities of the Silverlight map integrated together with other data visualization controls into a single application. The dashboard provides relevant sales and revenue information at a glance so users can obtain high-level aggregate data or drilldown for sales specifics by region, model, dealership, and product line.
Dashboards
In additional to geographic applications, Silverlight maps can also show floorplans, seating arrangements, layouts and more as illustrated below, where the Silverlight map control manages hospital bed allocations.
Floorplans
Your users can deep zoom into greater and greater levels of detail, going from satellite to aerial imagery. It's easy to add aerial and satellite imagery in your Silverlight maps by using the BingMapTileSource object with xamWebMap™. As a subclass of MultiScaleTileSource, it automates making REST requests to the Microsoft® bing™ maps service and picturing them as a background on your MapLayers.
Geo-Imagery
Silverlight mapping opens the growing world of geospatial data to your information visualization ("infovis") applications, as shown by this world map depicting birth rate by country. Users can zoom-in/zoom-out and pan the map by using the embedded zoom bar visible on the right-hand side of the map.
Geospatial Data
You will be able to create powerful geographic information systems in Silverlight as shown here where the Silverlight map control displays earthquake (temblor) locations on a world map that users can pan and zoom into.
GIS
In the accompanying map shown of Europe, you see one way of exposing to the user a set of checkboxes which they can use to control visibility of various map layers by individual country. You also see how the Silverlight map control allows these map elements (i.e., countries) to be identified using labels.
Layering
xamMap™ can be used to display maps in a color scheme that is consistent with what users expect from Microsoft® Office® 2010.
Office 2010 Style
The InfraAir airline seating plan illustrates use of the Silverlight map control beyond typical geographical solutions. The map control allows easy implementation of an interactive airline seating plan, integrating customized shape files with detailed visuals on seat location, quality, availability, and flight amenities.
Seating Plans
Shapefiles (with a .shp file extension) are a de facto industry standard file format for which there are a tremendous number of available resources enabling you to readily obtain maps. Most shapefiles can be associated with ubiquitous .dbf extension database files containing data fields (i.e., population densities) corresponding to the map elements (i.e., states) in the shapefile.
Shapefiles
SQL Server® 2008 supports geospatial data extensions (the geometry and geography data types) that you can pull into xamWebMap™ for use as map layers using the SqlShapeReader object. It also allows you to easily add columns to your database schema, such as the population by geography, and present this information on your Silverlight applications.
SQL Server 2008
Show your users detailed road and highway networks in your Silverlight applications using geo-imagery from providers such as OpenStreetMaps or CloudMade. xamWebMap™ features specialized MultiScaleTileSources named OpenStreetMapTileSource and CloudMadeTileSource, respectively, that you can use to retrieve street map image tiles that can be shown together with and deep zoom in conjunction with your map.
Street Maps