Steve Lombardi and Chris Pendleton have both blogged about the new release of Microsoft Virtual Earth (and Live Maps). Steve sums it up:

This ended up being a much bigger release than originally planned including three full sprints of development. As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the dozens of improvements across the application tiers including Geocoding enhancements, browser compatibility (Safari and IE8), parsing improvements, reverse geocoding, printing improvements and tons more. We are also releasing an upgrade of our Map Control to version 6.1 for developers.

For developers there are some enhancements that will be very welcomed. Johannes Kebeck looks at more detail at some of the new API features. I’m very interested in Safari support and better printing. We had a project use Google Maps because of poor Safari browser support (which was a key requirement).

I still can’t understand why Microsoft continues to put Virtual Earth under the “Live” banner. Live Search is the worst search product out there and having that stigma attached to what might very well be the best web mapping application around only limits its potential.

Now if they could only get the players to animate, I could watch a baseball game in VE3D.