One of the best things about Mix08 is that all the sessions are online, meaning if you don't go you can still educate yourself. The one I've just watched was given by Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Tech Evangelist, who demoed how developers can work with VE (via John). Chris actually starts with a great slide clarifying the difference between VE and Live Maps, with VE being the Ajax API and Live Maps the consumer offering built on this. Its nice to see the branding issues being tackled for a change.

While I'm not a developer, Chris gives such a good presentation that I'd encourage you all to watch it. Here's a few things I thought were worth sharing:

• Microsoft is storing 15 PetaBytes of data that is used with VE. Nothing to say for this except wow.
  
• The next VE release is April (I love it when they talk dirty)
  
• Virtual Earth + Silverlight - Chris demos a new Silverlight VE Control, adding media to the Virtual Earth experience. Jump to 52 minutes in and watch for the next 5 minutes to see how impessive this is. 
  
• Virtual Earth + Silverlight + Seadragon - Chris shows that by adding DeepZoom functionality to VE, any image media you add can then scale with the map. Scenarios I came up with were:
  - letting users add their PhotoZoom collages onto the own VE collections in order to share holiday snaps.
  - estate agents adding photos and videos of houses for sale
  but theres a whole bunch more (suggestions?)
  
• There's an MS VE Silerlight 2.0 Beta SDK coming soon

And here's the bonus link:

• Virtual Earth + Silverlight 2.0 game demo :)