Via the Mapperz blog this morning I came upon this great tutorial for loading ESRI .Shp files in Virtual Earth applications. The solution relies on the open source SharpMap project for converting the objects to VE Shapes. 

Big thanks to Marco Anastasi for putting together such an elegant and complete sample for Developers.

As part of our Import Feature in Live Maps we have considered adding support for ESRI shape files. Currently you can import KML, GPX and GeoRSS files into Collections at Live Maps. If there is sufficient demand from our customers we could add support for SHP files as well. What do you think? Is this something you would want to see as part of Live Maps import? or would it make more sense as to add support for ESRI SHP files to our API? or both :-) Let us know in comments here or by emailing your opinion to stevelom at microsoft d com.