If you are headed to TechEd next week and you have an interest in coding on Windows Phone 7 you may want to check out the Hackathon that is being held prior to the conference. On Monday, May 16th, from 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM the Hackathon will be held at the Omni Hotel At CNN Center, Grand Ballroom (A,B, C). What is a Hackathon? It’s an opportunity for you to get your hands dirty working on code getting something running on WP7.

First off, let me say that this blog post is not technical in nature. If you are reading my blog because of my interest in Windows Azure I’ll warn you now I’m not going to talk about Cloud Computing in this post, but instead I’m going to talk about something else I’m passionate about. For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter (@mikewo) you have missed out on the fact that I was in Florida for a few days attending what’s known as a NASA Tweetup.

The Windows Azure Team Blog has a great set of announcements that came out of the MIX 2011 conference today. Check out: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/04/12/windows-azure-news-from-mix11.aspx The things that stick out to me are: AppFabric Caching service is going live in the next 30 days. The Azure Traffic Manager was announced. This will be a great tool for redundancy and geo-distributed solutions. All the new ACS stuff which I mentioned in my previous post (and is over on the AppFabric team blog).