Microsoft Robotics Studio Launched

Microsoft has come up with a new Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. It's named Microsoft Robotics Studio. It is bundled with a lot of samples and tutorials.

The main objective of Robotics Studio is to have 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 for development of varied applications. Microsoft Robotics Studio aims three software areas:

• A scalable, extensible runtime architecture for wide variety of hardware and devices
• A set of tools that make programming and debugging robot applications easier
• A set of useful technology libraries and samples to help developers program robot applications better

System Requirements

Microsoft Robotics Studio can be downloaded at Microsoft  Robotics Studio official site. The application is about 80 MB in size and can be installed in Windows CE, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP. In order to install Robotics Studio, you need to install .NET Framework 2.0 SDK. Download .NET Framework 2.0 SDK. We can use Robotics Studio with Visual Studio 2005.  You need to have any of the Visual Studio 2005 editions.

You can find out more information about Microsoft Robotics Studio from

• Microsoft Robotics Studio Blog
• Microsoft Robotics Studio Forums
• Microsoft Robotics Studio Developer Center

Visual Studio 2005 - Get your Free copy

You can grab a free copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 offered by Microsoft. Visual Studio 2005 has an estimated retail price of $299.00. All you need is just register to Labcast and attend their Labcast series. These series helps you to get in depth knowledge from visual studio experts. Here are some of the labcast subjects

Learn how to

• Modernize and simplify installation of Visual Basic 6.0 applications
• Add new data-bound forms to Visual Basic 6.0 applications
• Introduce simple background threading to Visual Basic 6.0 applications
• View and edit SQL Server™ data
• Create data-centric Web applications with your Visual Basic desktop development skill
• Keep Microsoft Word documents in sync with your database

This offer is for a limited time and attend for any two labcast series and submit the evaluation form for each session, you could win a complementary copy of Visual Studio 2005. Try it out. If you are lucky, you would get the free copy or else you would gain knowledge on Visual Studio 2005. Anyway's, it is beneficial to us.

Microsoft Acropolis online Video Tutorials

Microsoft Acropolis is a set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications. One great thing about Acropolis is that separation of concerns between presentation and business logic. You can look at the Features of Microsoft Acropolis on my recent articles. Here are some of the videos about Acropolis.

Introduction to Acropolis

Using Acropolis PartPanes

Using the Acropolis Designer

Using Transitions in Acropolis

Acropolis was announced publicly at TechEd 2007. Here are some of the videos about Acropolis at TechEd 2007.

David's talk: Introducing the "Acropolis" Client Application Framework

Kathy's talk: Building Rich Client UI with the "Acropolis" Framework