On Friday, Microsoft announced that SQL Azure (Azure's relational database service) now supports geography and geometry types, plus spatial query support. These are the same geospatial extensions that were introduced with SQL Server 2008. This is a major piece of news for those who are wishing to build their own geospatial web applications from Microsoft's Azure cloud services. Not only do these new features include simple queries, but also more sophisticated operations such as union, intersection, and convex hull calculations.

The announcement can be found here,  and Johannes Kebeck has posted a how-to blog post about the new extensions and using them with Bing Maps.