I stumbled on Bus Monster last week and even though I don't take the bus I thought it was a pretty cool application. There's a mapping application that I've been wanting for a few years and I instantly realized that given the Google Maps API I could just write it myself.

Before starting I shot a mail off to Chandu and Steve on the MSN Virtual Earth team and asked if their API would be able to support building the application I wanted. They were like "Hell Yeah" and instead of working on my review I started hacking on Virtual Earth. In an afternoon hacking session, I discovered that I could build the app I wanted and learned new words like geocoding.

My hack should be running internally on my web server at Microsoft before the end of the week. Whenever Virtual Earth goes live I'll move the app to my personal web site. I definitely learned something new with this application and will consider Hacking MSN Virtual Earth as a possible topic for a future Extreme XML column on MSDN. Would anyone be interested in that?