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It's been a busy time for the Windows Phone team at Microsoft. On Tuesday, the company announced that the highly-anticipated update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system known as "Mango" had been released to manufacturing. This is an important milestone indicating the final phase of of Mango's development.

Now developers are being offered an updated SDK to complement release: the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 "Beta 2 Refresh." And they can also download a new pre-release build of Mango onto their retail devices, too, says Microsoft.

This week Microsoft Research released Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime, a developer preview of a new product designed for working with large distributed data sets. Microsoft also has a big data analytics platform that uses LINQ instead of MapReduce called LINQ to HPC. Notably, LINQ to HPC is used in production at Microsoft Bing.

But Microsoft is entering an increasingly crowded market. There's the open source Apache Hadoop, which is now being sold in different flavors by companies such as Cloudera, DataStax, EMC, IBM and soon a spin-off of Yahoo. Not to mention HPCC which will be open-sourced by LexisNexis.

Microsoft's products are currently in early, experimental stages and the company may never step up the development and marketing of these to be serious Hadoop and HPCC competitors. But could Microsoft be competitive here if it wants to?

Microsoft has announced that developers building mobile applications for its next big release of the Windows Phone operating system, code-named "Mango," will be able to submit those applications to its app marketplace starting in August. Or more specifically, August 22nd.

This news comes at the same time as a rollout of an updated developer portal is underway. The new "App Hub" will support more geographic markets, private distribution options and will offer better application and account management capabilities.

Microsoft is making it easier for mobile developers building apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone to integrate data from Windows Live into their applications. With the recently released update to the developer platform known as Messenger Connect, Microsoft introduced APIs for SkyDrive, Hotmail and Messenger, which can be used in both websites and mobile apps.

Microsoft is funding a project to make Scala available within the .Net and Mono. The Scala website is running an interview with Miguel Garcia, the developer behind the project.

According to Garcia, you can already use Scala with .Net. There are some limitations now, but he says they will be removed by fall. "If you have a Scala program working on the JVM then for the most part you only need to recompile it with the Scala.Net compiler and it will run there too," he says.

Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

One of the various announcements coming out of VMware this week is change to how vSphere is priced. VMware's "simplified" pricing can be found in a nightmarish 10 page white paper. Hey, no one ever said enterprise technology pricing was easy.

But the problem is that VMware's new prices are much higher for some customers. Ars Technica points to this thread on VMware's community site. And CRN reports on how Microsoft is already hammering VMware on its new pricing model.

Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based service from Microsoft (read our take on it here), already supports Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Lync. We've reported that BlackBerry Enterprise Server is coming to 365 as well. What else can you expect to see in Microsoft's cloud in the future?

According to Mary Jo Foley, Dynamics CRM Online and Windows Intune have already confirmed. And Microsoft Business Solutions Corporate Vice President Michael Park let slip that Project and Visio are on the way as well.

This week at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference the company made its tablet strategy more clear. As reported by Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Windows Phone President Andy Lees said: "We view a tablet as a sort of PC. We want people to be able to do the sorts of things that they expect on a PC on a tablet, things like networking to be able to connect to networks, and utilize networking tools, to get USB drives and plot them into the tablet."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said in the past that tablets won't run Windows Phone 7. The reasoning is now more clear: Microsoft wants the full version of Windows on tablets, not the Phone version. This might not be the only reason - the company might also be worried about cannibalizing Windows license sales with tablets.

Is the decision to focus on putting one version of Windows everywhere a mistake?

Over 400 college students from around the world gathered this week in New York City for the 2011 Finals of the Imagine Cup. Microsoft's student technology competition. On stage this evening, the awards were handed out to the winning teams in a variety of categories. You can read the full list of winners below.

The participating students aren't simply showcasing their technology skills. They're applying those skills to tackle some of the world's most pressing problems: child mortality, disease, hunger, poverty, pollution. Listening to these students' presentations, I was struck by what was often a personal motivation for solving these issues and their passion, again not just for the tech, but for making the world a better place.