Welcome to Microsoft Robotics Studio (1.5)

In December 2006, we released version 1.0 of Microsoft Robotics Studio. Since that time, we've been at work on a number of improvements and enhancements. Thank you for the great feedback and suggestions we received. In April this year we started previewing 1.5 and now we are pleased to announce it as an official release to the Web. This release extends our objective to deliver to the entire robotics community, a toolkit that enables students, hobbyists, researchers, and commercial developers to develop applications and provide a catalyst for what we see as an exciting future (as reflected in Bill Gates' essay that appeared in the January 2007 issue of Scientific American). To that end we have loaded this new release with the following:

Extended Runtime Support

We have ported our runtime files, CCR and DSS, to support the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework, making it possible to deploy applications to Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices as well as applications that may span across these operating systems and Windows XP and Vista. As a result it enables even greater choice in terms of core OS alternatives.

To respond to growing interest in applying our services architecture beyond just use on Microsoft operating systems, we are pleased to announce the releasing the DSS Protocol (DSSP) under the Microsoft Open Software Promise that makes the protocol, like SOAP and other popular Microsoft services protocols and formats, available royalty-free, which we believe will provide a programming model to support communication between a wide variety of hardware and software.

We have also enhanced our runtime, adding support for binary serialization for a 5 times faster message throughput.

Many of you asked for more information about using CCR and DSS, so we have added extensive new user guides as well as sample code.

Programming Improvements

Microsoft Visual Programming Language has not only gotten a visual overhaul and improvements to its user interface, but now features a new code generator that creates actual C# code. This not only increases overall execution performance, but also enables you use VPL for rapid application development and then continue with the generated C# code. VPL also directly supports development to target Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices.

Our new DSS Manifest Editor simplifies the task of creating and editing manifests. The new visual editor enables you to drag and drop services to create manifests as well as easily define partnerships and configuration files.

Due to popular request, we added support to the DSSNewService command line tool for managed C++ allowing you to more easily integrate with existing C++ code libraries.

Like VPL, our Visual Simulation Environment has received a number of new enhancements to both its user interface as well as to its rendering support. Support for shadows, multiple light sources, a material editor, and many other improvements.

New Sample Services

We've added a number of new services and tutorials to this release to further give you not only examples but useful functions you can use in developing your applications. Included are new services for speech recognition and simple vision and gesture recognition, UPnP device discovery service, and services to support Atom/RSS blogging and integration with SQL databases.

Simulated Competition Packages

While previewed and featured at actual competition events already, this release also finalizes the new Robot Sumo Simulation as well as the new Soccer Simulation packages.

These enable you to write not only write your own player services, but host your own robot competitions.

In summary, there are a lot of new improvements, enhancements, and features in this latest release. We welcome you to download it and try it out.

Licensing policy remains the same, though we have extended the availability to purchase the license to a number of additional countries. If you already have a 1.0 license, unused distribution of runtime copies can be applied. For further details, see our licensing information .

We want to thank everyone that has contributed feedback and suggestions for improvement as well as help test the previews and encourage you to continue through our forum. Also be certain to check out our partner information to see what new services and products are coming out that support Microsoft Robotics Studio. There are some exciting new hardware platforms and nice software services. Also be sure to check out our community page with links to what other people are doing with Microsoft Robotics Studio.

It's time that we get back to getting the next version ready now. Plenty left to do!

Best regards,

Tandy Trower and the Microsoft Robotics Team