The Virtual Earth ASP.NET control WILL BE shipped in the Windows Live Tools July CTP

When I was in Australia for reMIX, I managed to wrangle some camera time with the team from BuilderAU (awesome developer resource in Australia – by developers for developers) and they covered a bit of our video interview in Club Builder – a tech wrap up of what’s new with BuilderAU’s editor Chris Duckett.

In my session at reMIX some questions came up as to when the ASP.NET server control will be released and I talked about us not having the ship vehicle locked (i.e. Open Source on Codeplex vs Reference License vs released as a Microsoft supported tool) - I do lots of open source development with the Windows Live Quick Apps so I know this space reasonably well. During the session Chris Duckett was there and we riffed on this in our video interview later that day – check out the snippet where I schooled for my use of the word “story” – its another Microsoft-ism I've picked up like S+ or forcing-function.

I do tend to agree, getting the latest tech bits in the hands of developers as soon as possible is definitely my preference – I’d love for devs to get access to our build servers :) But when it comes to how we release software there are so many different avenues we can take and that really defines the future of that “product” so I would prefer to do it right the first time, than release something which ends up changing quite a bit hurting developers and making us unpredictable.

As for timing - I'm hoping in the near future but there will be more updates coming

UPDATE: "Near Future" wasn't specific enough so let me be specific - the current plan is to include the bits in the Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio July CTP - watch dev.live.com/tools