Following several days of Microsoft’s cloud computing product, Azure, being an item of discussion, it today returned to the newsrolls, albeit in a different fashion. Microsoft hast just releasedversion o.8 of its Azure toolkit for Android. Alongside that release, the Windows Phone Azure toolkit hit version 1.3 today, and the iOS toolkit saw the release of a new version numbered 1.2.1. Azure had been in the news previously due to somepublic scrabbling between Microsoft and VMwareover their competing cloud computing offerings....

TNW Quick Hit: Just over a month after the company released theAzure toolkit for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft hasdone the same for iOS, and Android is next in line. The company is determined to grow the popularity of Azure, even outside of its home court. Accordingto ZDNet, Microsoft had this to say on the goals of the new toolkit: “[The iOS toolkit will] make it easier to target Windows Azure by offering native libraries for non-Microsoft platforms....

Listen up you enterprise fanatics, we have news: Today Microsoft released the beta of Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2. As of now, there is no known ship time for the final R2 edition. Forefront Identity Manger 2010 was released in March of 2010. The R2 beta contains the following features, according to Microsoft: I you want to download the software, headhere. Microsoft calls Forefront Identity Manager “a comprehensive solution for managing identities, credentials, and identity-based access policies across heterogeneous policies....

Microsoft has just released the officialBingapp for iPad on the App Store, making it the first Microsoft app for the iPad. The app features the glorious slideshow of daily images similar to the website and iPhone app. The app is location aware, so it asks you for your location on launch and brings you your local weather, news, maps, movies, trends and finance at the bottom of the app. Tapping on each little section at the bottom takes you to a full-featured implementation where you can browse around....

Giving things away for free is not always a low-risk strategy, Microsoft continues to learn. The company released two new, free, Xbox LIVE titles today for Windows Phone: Sudoku and Minesweeper. Given that the games are free, Microsoft is going to eat their development cost, so the Windows Phone community is grateful, right? Wrong. As it turns out, probably due to a lawyer somewhere having indigestion, the titles are only available in the US market....