Microsoft has released Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. This release is an update that has the functionality of the previous RDS 2008 R3 Standard Edition with the addition of support for the Kinect sensor and a defined Reference Platform, also referred to as MARK (Mobile Autonomous Robot using Kinect).

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 the robot 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 4 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, 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.

  Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4