I\'m thinking about making a simple map control in WPF, and am thinking about the design of the basic map interface and am wondering if anyone has some good advice for this. >
It does not fall on my field of work at all, but you may have a look at MapWindow GIS, which has an Open Source ActiveX object that provides a lot of mapping and GIS features.
Here is a post explaining how to embed it on WPF applications: