It's fun when hobbies and work matters have some commonality. As a robotics fan it was interesting therefore to see Microsoft's recent announcement of the Microsoft Robotics Studio. To quote the press release:

"Today at RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006, Microsoft Corp. showcased the community technology preview (CTP) of a new Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotic applications for a wide variety of computing platforms. The community technology preview of the Microsoft Robotics Studio is available for download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics."

The Microsoft Robotics Studio includes a visual programming tool (supports Visual C#, Visual Basic .NET, Jscript, and the Microsoft IronPython programming languages), a 3-D robot application simulator, and a light-weight services-oriented runtime based on .NET. Key vendors supporting the initiative include the LEGO Group, Fischertechnik and Parallax. Universities involved include Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Cornell, Stanford, and Georgia Tech.

As with any Microsoft announcement feedback falls into two camps. On one hand people are very enthusiastic about a set of powerful tools for doing robotics education, development, and deployment. While others are saying the model is too complex, too resource intensive, and yet another example of Microsoft trying to control the world. Regardless, this is fun way of explaining services-oriented architecture to people!