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.