Great news on the performance front. As of now the Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the Virtual Earth Platform is live!!!

The Microsoft CDN is a key pillar of the Microsoft cloud computing strategy and is one of the primary investments the Virtual Earth team is making to increase overall platform performance. CDN is composed of multiple geo-distributed data centres (throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia) that allow Virtual Earth to host content closer to customers and end users.

As a result of CDN, delivery speeds of Virtual Earth content have been improved up to 82 percent for both the Virtual Earth AJAX Map Control and Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control. This first release is part of an on-going program that will expand the network later this year.

To begin utilizing CDN, you will need to make an opt-in, non-breaking change to your AJAX map control code; no action is required for Silverlight Map Control users, as CDN logic is already built-in. You will find some documentation here but it is really very simple. You just need to add 4 little characters in the script-reference and change from:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2"></script>