14 DAY TRIAL // The latest iteration of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is now available for download, free of charge to hobbyists, academics and even to developers in the commercial space. The Redmond company is offering Release 3 of the 2008 version of its robotics development platform in a single edition, and is pushing to attract both professional and non-professional devs. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 brings to the table all the functionality associated with the previous Standard Edition of the platform, but of course, at no cost, Stathis Papaefstathiou, general manager of Microsoft Robotics, reveals.
“New features in Microsoft RDS 2008 R3 include added support for Visual Studio 2010 and two additional simulation environments (Multi-level House and Factory). Additional samples have been made available on CodePlex, including Sumo and Soccer simulations. By making source code available on CodePlex, the community can modify and extend the Microsoft RDS platform,” Papaefstathiou noted.
What is important to underline is that devs previously working with Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 will not get a major upgrade, as would be expected from an R3 Build. Instead, Microsoft emphasized that R3 was a minor update, focused mainly on making Standard Edition functionality available in a single package free of charge to all users, as opposite to having separate Editions of the platform.
“Whether you're a hobbyist, academic or commercial customer, or just curious about developing robotics applications, Microsoft RDS 2008 R3 gives you everything you need to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of different hardware,” Papaefstathiou added. “By offering this software free of charge, we're hoping to help push the robotics market towards the sustainable scale I mentioned earlier -- putting Microsoft RDS in the hands of as many developers as possible to innovate and experiment with. We're enthusiastic to see what developers around the world, of all backgrounds and levels of knowledge, will bring to the table using Microsoft RDS in the months to come.”
The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 is available for download here.