Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 Express Edition

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) 2008 R2. The R2 release focuses on quality and usability. In addition to new features, a deep test pass was performed to improve the quality of the code and documentation.

Please visit Microsoft’s new web site to download RDS 2008 R2 Express Edition.
Channel 9 is featuring a video for the new RDS release.


RDS is a software development kit for creating robotics applications. It provides the basic infrastructure for building applications that are highly concurrent and allows them to be distributed across multiple computers in a network by using a message-passing framework. At the lowest level, programmers can write the equivalent of device drivers for sensors and actuators. However, a primary function of RDS is to orchestrate higher-level services so that they can interact with each other to implement complex behaviors.

The core components of RDS include:

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) .NET-based concurrency and coordination library makes asynchronous application development simple, eliminating the conventional complexities of manual threading, locks, and semaphores

Decentralized Software Services (DSS) Lightweight state-oriented services architecture enabling easy composition of late-bound, loosely-coupled applications

Visual Programming Language (VPL) Simple drag-and-drop visual programming language tool makes it easy to create robotic applications.

Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) Simulate and test robotic applications using dynamic 3D graphical models and physics