A lot have been happening to SharpMap lately. Several new features are already available in the alpha release. Here are some of the features that now readily are available:

• Gradient Theme now works on not only fill-color, but all numeric style properties, giving even greater flexibility for controlling font-sizes, pen and outline color and widths etc. based on a numeric attribute.
• Custom Theme: Define your own method that determines the style of a feature based on geometry and feature attribute. Ex. "Make all polygons with an area>100 and whose name starts with "S" green with a blue outline.
• Symbols can now be scaled.
• Create a WMS server with only very few lines of code.
• Labels can now follow lines, or be rotated based on an attribute.
• Lots of bug-fixes and optimizations.
• Use any OleDb datasource that holds X and Y columns for creating a point layer.

Diego Guidi - who is the developer of NetTopologySuite has also created a link between SharpMap and NTS. This means that you instantly get all the great functionality of NTS inside SharpMap, including on-the-fly transformation, buffering etc. You can apply any custom method that performs NTS operations on any SharpMap datasource and render the result with SharpMap. Get it at the download section.

Download at http://sharpmap.iter.dk