Microsoft has released Robotics Studio September 2006 CTP

The goal of the Microsoft Robotics Studio is to supply a software platform for the robotics community that can be used across a wide variety of hardware, applicable to a wide audience of users, and development of a wide variety of applications. As a platform, our intent is also to enable third parties to supply support for new hardware, technologies, and tools, just as Microsoft Windows provides a platform for others to bring their products and technologies to the community of PC users. So while we may populate our platform with some of our own contributions, those should not be considered exclusive to tools or libraries provided by other parties looking to provide interesting technologies for this platform.

The Microsoft Robotics Studio delivers three areas of software:
A scalable, extensible runtime architecture that can span a wide variety of hardware and devices. The programming interface can be used to address robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors as well as 32-bit systems with multi-core processors and devices from simple touch sensors to laser distance finding devices.
A set of useful tools that make programming and debugging robot applications scenarios easier. These include a high quality visual simulation environment that uses the Ageia Technologies PhysX engine.
A set of useful technology libraries services samples to help developers get started with writing robot applications.
Our development environment runs on the platforms listed in the section "System Requirements". It can be used to support robots that support these platforms as well as robots that can be remotely controlled from a PC running a supported platform. The remote control can for example be through a serial port, Bluetooth, RF or Wi-Fi. We provide information that can be used by hardware or software vendors to make their products compatible with our development platform.

We are pleased to present this community technical preview (CTP). As a preview this represents an early release not yet intended for commercial use, however, it should enable you to try out and see what we are working on. Similarly, this CTP does not include all the components we hope to deliver, so there may be subsequent updates we provide. Also as a preview, some of what here may be subject to change before commercial release.

Robotics Studio September 2006 CTP