John O' Brien blogs about Virtual earth Map Control on LiveSide.net. John gives a deep dive introduction with series of videos and a sample project using Map Control.

To Quote John from his blog post,

"Through a series of videos we take you through the full experience of installing the control and coding with its basic features. Each video is fairly detailed and runs for about 5-7min. They are hosted by Silverlight Streaming so you will need to install the latest Beta2 Silverlight Client or download the wmv file directly."
 
Following Video describes how to set map properties on client side without any code written.
 
Other Videos and Samples are listed in John's blog post. You can download the sample code from here. The working online sample is posted here: http://veasp.soulsolutions.com.au/Introduction/01SettingMapProperties.aspx
 
Besides, John, other bloggers from Australia are also reaching out their audiences.
Dr. Neil's blog posts:
http://drneil.blogspot.com/2008/08/windows-live-tools-for-visual-studio.html
http://drneil.blogspot.com/2008/07/windows-live-tools-for-microsoft-visual.html 

James McCutcheon's blog post:
http://jamesmcc.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/want-some-windows-live-love-come-and-get-it/ 

Nick Randolph's blog post:
http://community.softteq.com/blogs/nick/archive/2008/08/01/asp-net-virtual-earth-control-windows-live-tools-for-vs2008-ctp3.aspx

Nick's blog post also has a video for VE Map Control.