Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 Released - Now one edition, still free, VS2010 compatible, new simulation environments and more

Microsoft Announces Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3

“Taking a look back at the recent past in the robotics industry reflects a period full of promise, excitement, anticipation, and rapid evolution. So much movement has happened in the right direction; we've watched closely as robotics technology has begun to transition along the path from a big, expensive, specialized, industrial level towards a future of a friendly, service-oriented, home and personal level, where everyone has the potential to use and benefit from this technology. But putting this positive progress aside for a moment, it's critical to the future sustainability and success of the industry that we keep working to expand the reach of our robotics community to a greater scale.

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And today, we're even more excited to announce the availability of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 (Microsoft RDS). What's new?

• Microsoft RDS is now offered free of charge as a download at http://www.microsoft.com/robotics/.
• Microsoft RDS is now available as a single edition -- containing all of the functionality of the previous Standard Edition at no cost.
• New features in Microsoft RDS 2008 R3 include added support for Visual Studio 2010 and two additional simulation environments (Multi-level House and Factory).
• Additional samples have been made available on CodePlex, including Sumo and Soccer simulations. By making source code available on CodePlex, the community can modify and extend the Microsoft RDS platform.

Other new updates/changes include:

• The CCR & DSS Toolkit has been merged into RDS 2008 R3
  • CCR & DSS will remain a core component of RDS
  • CCR & DSS can be obtained by installing the full RDS package
• R3 is no longer compatible with Compact Framework (CF) development
• Samples for languages other than C# have been moved to CodePlex.

Whether you're a hobbyist, academic or commercial customer, or just curious about developing robotics applications, Microsoft RDS 2008 R3 gives you everything you need to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of different hardware.

…”

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3

“Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 is a freely available .NET-based programming environment for building robotics applications. It can be used by both professional and non-professional developers as well as hobbyists.

File Name:	Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3.exe
Version:	2.2.76.0
Date Published:	5/12/2010
Language:	English
Download Size:	444.1 MB

Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. The R3 release is a minor update that has the functionality of the previous Standard Edition, but is available at no cost to all users. As of the R3 release there are no separate Editions and only a single download.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio can support a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform (if it has an embedded PC running Windows) or controlling it from a Windows PC through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.

In addition to providing support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 provides a Visual Programming Language (VPL) which allows developers to create applications simply by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas and wiring them together.

The powerful Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) provides a high-fidelity simulation environment powered by NVIDIA™ PhysX™ engine for running game-quality 3D simulations with real-world physics interactions.

To help developers getting started, the Robotics Developer Studio contains extensive documentation and a large set of samples and tutorials that illustrate how to write applications ranging from simple "Hello Robot" to complex applications that simultaneously run on multiple robots

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What’s the one thing cooler than robots?

Well duh… Giant Robots!

Sorry to say, Giant Robots are not part of Microsoft RDS v3 (well they COULD be with a little coding! MUHAHAHAHA ;) but still that doesn’t take away from its coolness. The major coolness is the VS2010 support and the fact there’s now one combined free edition.

<whine> I really do wish though that these “Studio’s” would embrace Visual Basic (i.e. RDS, XNA, etc). Yeah, yeah, I’m not starting a language war, etc, but I’ve been doing VB for so many years and it’s the language I dream in (sigh) that it would be nice to leverage that. I mean, in the end it’s all IL isn’t it? So I just don’t understand why we’re waiting so long for VB support (assuming we ever get it). </whine>

 

Related Past Post XRef:
What’s better than writing/building virtual robot tanks in .Net and having them battle it out? Having them battle Java virtual tanks!

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 Released
Microsoft Robotics Studio (1.5) Released
Other Microsoft Products Released this past week, XNA Game Studio and Robotics Studio

Free “Programming Microsoft Robotics Studio” eBook (reg-ware, Copyright 2008, for MSRS v1.5)
"An Introduction to Programming Robots with Microsoft Robotics Studio"
Learn to Master your Inner Robot - Introductory Courseware for Microsoft Robotics Studio
MSDN Webcast: Robotics: Programming Lego Mindstorms Using Visual Basic 2005 Express (Level 100)