Keith posted this awesome Silverlight3 demo showing that although the new Virtual Earth control is Silverlight2 you can happily put this in the newer framework. With this in mind I put together this little sample showing how you can use the new Pixel Shaders to drastically modify the map control. The sample makes use of the http://wpffx.codeplex.com/ project as described by Morten Nielson.
View the live demo here if you have Silverlight3 running on your test machine:
http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/VEPixelShader/
My favourite is the Zoom Blur, it would be interesting to enable this during zoom animation.