Lots of Virtual Earth and Silverlight Development Outside of Microsoft

I'm seeing lots of Virtual Earth integration in Silverlight light. And, I have to say I LOVE IT. Today is no exception. IDV Solutions just launched their Silverlight Map Viewer which is their new interface for their Visual Fusion Server product. This is a big move for IDV as most of their stack is Microsoft technology and the Flash interface was one of the remaining artifacts in moving to a complete Microsoft stack. What else? How about Soul Solutions who published Deep Earth on CodePlex? Deep Earth is an open source community project that combines the interactive experience in Silverlight 2 Deep Zoom with photo tiles from Virtual Earth. This actually featured on Channel 9 - "DeepEarth: Virtual Earth using Silverlight Deep Zoom." IS Consulting makers of MapDotNet have their own MapDotNet Silverlight interface for Virtual Earth and GIS data, as well. Infusion Development has invested quite a bit of time in Virtual Earth (as you may have noticed in the Virtual Earth Developer Forums) and has developed a few applications already using Silverlight.

I get posed the question all the time, "Chris, when is Microsoft going to release the Microsoft Virtual Earth Silverlight Control?" At this point, I'm not sure we have to! Silverlight and some undocumented / unsupported functionality from Virtual Earth make for some powerful applications from our development community. Oh, it's the "undocumented/unsupported" piece that makes you nervous? Well, let me take care of that; however, I'm starting to think that maybe I recommend backing off the product group's investment in Silverlight and Virtual Earth. Thoughts?

CP