One of the exciting announcements we made last week at SXSW Interactive 2010 was the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Facebook. This new toolkit, built by Thuzi in collaboration with Microsoft, enables developers to rapidly develop Facebook applications on Windows Azure.

To see the toolkit in action, check out Thuzi.com CTO Jim Zimmerman's session, Facebook Apps in Windows Azure, at Mix10 last week where he showcased live Facebook applications for Outback Steakhouse and CloudPoll that were both built using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Facebook.

The toolkit includes:

• Facebook Developers Toolkit
• Ninject 2.0 for Dependency Injection
• ASP.NET MVC 2
• Windows Azure Software Development Kit (February 2010)
• AutoMapper
• Windows Azure Toolkit - Simplified library for accessing Message Queues, Table Storage and SQL Azure
• Automated build scripts for one-click deployment from TFS 2010 to Azure

To get started, you'll need to:

• Set up a Facebook Developers Account
• Set up an IFrame Facebook Application
• Set up a Windows Azure Account
• Set up a database in SQL Azure
• Set up a storage account in Windows Azure for Table Storage, Message Queues and Blob Storage

Let us know what you think by posting a comment to this post; how are you planning to use the toolkit and what additional resources do you need to get started?  As always, we look forward to hearing from you.