Silverlight map 'saga' continues

After posting about my Silverlight/Virtual Earth overlay on RaceReplay and my plans for a Silverlight VirtualEarth viewer on codeplex, I got a friendly message from Microsoft about using the Virtual Earth tile servers "outside of the terms of service".

I figured it would be 'more responsible' to ensure that the Tile Client at least supported the Virtual Earth logo & copyright details, so I spent a bit of time working on displaying the correct copyright notice in Silverlight - the goal being that the Silverlight client would be indistinguishable from the "real thing".

Turns out Greg Shechter from Microsoft has come up with a similar concept (it's pretty obvious, after all) - a Virtual Earth Viewer (but using Silverlight 1.1, not 1.0)... (screenshot below)

It's a pretty cool sample - but even he didn't bother with the copyright; and it seems like a double-standard for MS to 'ask' me about accessing the tile images directly while at the same time releasing demo/samples that do exactly the same thing! Particularly since Greg's stuff actually works whereas my posts consist of a 4-tile proof-of-concept and a pile of ideas...