Crafting your own basemap styles with Flex or Silverlight

By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead, for Ismael Chivite, ArcGIS Server product management team

When building web mapping applications, choosing the right basemap is not always an easy task. I always look for basemaps that will make my data stand out. I do not want the basemap to be a distraction. I also ask that the basemaps provide good context: maps with rich background information, generally in the form of roads, place names etc.

While ArcGIS Online provides you with quite a variety of basemaps, in this post we are going to explore a handy technique for giving a final touch to those basemaps. A technique that may actually achieve the balance you were looking for, without requiring you to make any new maps from scratch. Using logic available in Flex and Silverlight, we will apply a client-side color remapping to the map tiles. This makes it possible to apply a great number of styles to existing basemaps without creating new tile caches.

Read the full blog entry on the ArcGIS Server blog.