At the MIX conference this week Microsoft is announcing several really cool new features and tools for Windows Azure. A new update for Windows Azure AppFabric has also been announced a few days ago on the AppFabric Team Blog. I won’t repeat what they posted there, so go check out what’s new.

While I was out at the MVP Summit in early March I got the chance to do an interview with Dave Nielsen (one of the founders of Cloud Camp) for his Dave on Azure series. They’ve just released all the interviews from that day on YouTube (embedded below), but will be featuring each independently over on the MSDN Bytes site. This was a fun interview; however, in watching this I realize I answered almost every question starting with “well…”.

Interested in combining Windows Phone 7 apps with Windows Azure? Microsoft (via Wade Wegner) has posted the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone over on CodePlex. Check it out at http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/. The toolkit has several templates to add to Visual Studio that will help give you a jump start on combining these two platforms, or at least give you some ideas on where to get started if you want to build yours from scratch.