Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio


Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is a Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation. It is aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handles a wide variety of robot hardware. It requires the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.
RDS is based on CCR : a.NET-based concurrent library implementation for managing asynchronous parallel tasks. This technique involves using message-passing and a lightweight services-oriented runtime, DSS, which allows the orchestration of multiple services to achieve complex behaviors.
Features include: a visual programming tool, Microsoft Visual Programming Language for creating and debugging robot applications, web-based and windows-based interfaces, 3D simulation, easy access to a robot's sensors and actuators. The primary programming language is C#.
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio includes support for packages to add other services to the suite. Those currently available include Soccer Simulation and Sumo Competition by Microsoft, and a community-developed Maze Simulator, a program to create worlds with walls that can be explored by a virtual robot, and a set of services for OpenCV. Most of the additional packages are hosted on . are also available.

Components

There are four main components in RDS:
CCR and DSS are also available separately for use in commercial applications that require a high level
of concurrency and/or must be distributed across multiple nodes in a network. This package is called the .

Tools

The tools that allow to develop an MRDS application contain a graphical environment command line tools allow you to deal with Visual Studio projects in C#, and 3D simulation tools.
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio has not been updated or patched since version 4.0, which was released on March 8, 2012.
On September 22, 2014, as part of Microsoft's restructuring plan, the Robotics division of Microsoft Research was suspended, according to a tweet from Ashley Feniello, a principal developer at Microsoft Robotics division of MSR. It is now highly unlikely that MRDS will ever be updated again, however forum members may still offer limited support.