Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio

Especially intended for both professional programmers and novice users, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (also referred to as Microsoft RDS or MRDS) is a comprehensive and full-featured solution, that comes with support for .NET Framework 4.0, XNA 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 in order to build complex robotics applications in no time.

Designed as a .NET-based programming environment, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio targets a wide range of scenarios that can support various platforms by either running directly on the platform, or simply controlling the designed robot through a communication channel, here referring to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Since it is based on CCR, a .NET-based concurrent library, you are able to easily manage and organize asynchronous parallel tasks. This way, you can design and develop programs in order to handle input from different robotics sensors effortlessly.

The VPL component, that states for Visual Programming Language, helps developers to create applications in an intuitive manner by simply dragging and dropping the required components onto a predefined canvas.

In this manner, you are able to customize services for different hardware elements, make all the components to interact graphically, as well as simulate the behavior of robots using the NVIDIA PhysX technology - which is a powerful engine optimized for hardware acceleration by parallel processors.

Because of the scalable platform and of the included components such as CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime), DSS (Decentralized Software Services), VPL and VSE (Visual Simulation Environment), developers can transfer their skills across multiple platforms, thus developing applications on single or multi-core processors.

Thanks to the extensive documentation that Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio provides you with, you are able to learn the basic scripts in order to write applications ranging from simple programs to complex ones.

To conclude, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is a complete solution that supports both remotely connected and robot-based scenarios and helps you to develop applications using different programming languages.