"Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games" preview released - Toolkit to help you Social your .Net or HTML5 games...

Windows Azure - Build Your Next Game with the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games

"...

Today at Seattle Casual Connect, we announced the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. This toolkit includes accelerators, common libraries, and deployment tools to help developers quickly get started building social games. Additionally, the toolkit provides samples and guidance for other scenarios, such as using Facebook credits to monetize a game.

...

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games is available for .NET and HTML5; future updates will include support of additional languages.

..."

CodePlex - Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games

"The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games allows you to quickly get started building new social games in Windows Azure. The social gaming market continues to grow and become more profitable, and eMarketer predicts it will increase to $1.32 billion in revenues by 2012 (up from $856 million in 2010). To help you quickly tap into this market, the toolkit includes accelerators, libraries, developer tools, and samples that you can use in your own .NET or HTML5 game. The toolkit also enables unique capabilities for social gaming prerequisites, such as storing user profiles, maintaining leader boards, in-app purchasing and so forth.

Windows Azure

The Windows Azure platform provides game developers with on-demand compute, storage, content delivery and networking capabilities so that they can focus on development as opposed to operational

Windows Azure is a cloud-computing platform that lets you run applications and store data in the cloud. Instead of having to worry about building out the underlying infrastructure and managing the operating system, you can simply build your application and deploy it to Windows Azure. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, networking, and content delivery capabilities. For more information about Windows Azure, visit the Windows Azure website. For developer focused training material, download the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit or view the online Windows Azure Platform Training Course.

Tankster

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games also comes with a new proof-of-concept game called Tankster from industry innovator Grant Skinner and his team at gskinner.com.

Tankster is built with HTML5 and comes complete with reusable server side code and documentation. It also supports a variety of social interactions including messaging, wall posts, and comments while player achievements and game stats are presented on a live leaderboard so gamers can interact with each other—what’s a social game without being able to talk trash?

..."

interesting. Will keep an eye on this to see if it has any legs...