Editor: Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. The R3 release is a minor update that has the functionality of the previous Standard Edition, but is available at no cost to all users. As of the R3 release there are no separate Editions and only a single download.
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 it 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 2008 R3 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, the 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.