A few comments.
stepping throught the silverlight toolkit code, I can see that the legend template's IsInScaleRange is based on MaxResolution and MinResolution properties from my layer, which do not relate at all to the scale thresholds I've set in my mxd.... this seems odd that IsInScaleRange is not based on Scale value.
so, from what I've read, the way to get my feature layer to honour it's max min scale values from the mxd is:
1. after the layer has initialzed (layer_Initialized), make another http request to get the json, and retrieve the minscale maxscale values from this.
2. calcuate what the maxResolution and minResolution values should be based on max/min Scale values.
3. set the max/min Resolution values.
It would be great if for a featureLayer the max min Scale properties were exposed (as they are for an ArcGISDynamicMapService), and then for the IsInScaleRange (in the legend template) to actually use these max/min Scale ranges (taken from the mxd) rather than the seemingly irrelevent max and min Resolution.
Mike