Free MapPoint Web Service Access for 1 Year

The MapPoint web service is offering a free 1 year subscription to MSDN subscribers.

This is pretty handy.  You are probably familiar with the MapPoint service on MSN at http://www.mappoint.com (which is very cool, by the way.  Check out the LineDrive functionality of the directions system).  What you may or may not know is that http://www.mappoint.com is actually a demonstration application of the MapPoint Web Service. 

If you are handy with web services you can use the MapPoint Web Service to design applications that run on your PocketPC or SmartPhone, or within you application that return map information such as points of interest near a location, the driving distance between to points, and it will even return images of the maps rendered for whatever purpose you want (including mobile images and high-res images for printing).

I have always been curious about this and this just may be the tipping point.