This news comes from Hannes's Virtual Earth Blog.

Microsoft has just released several new features into the Virtual Earth API, allowing developers to further enhance their Virtual Earth map control v6 applications:

1. It is now possible to import 3D collections into VEDataType.VECollection.
2. It is now possible to import KML and GPX data into VEDataType.ImportXML. This is obviously great news. We can now consider using KML as a data standard for our organization.
3. Localized driving directions can now be accessed through the API by adding the market you're interested in (en-us for the United States) to the end of the map control URL (e.g. http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6&mkt=en-us).
4. SSL support has been added for the Virtual Earth map control (https://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6). This may not sound like a huge enhancement, but support for SSL is a huge need for enterprise customers. It is a major pain when developers have an SSL-secured application but their users get security warnings when browsing to a page that has an embedded map. I have heard much grumbling among users of the Google Maps API that including SSL support doesn't seem to be a priority for Google. Maybe this is just another demonstration that Virtual Earth is becoming the standard for mapping in the enterprise?