Reader Kirk pointed me to this article... confirms a lot of what we've been reading about Microsofts Robotic Software Suite...
Jim
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Anonymous said…
The Microsoft produced video about Robotics Studio briefly shows the NXT. I though it rather cute that a Microsoft Windows logo was very clearly displayed on the NXT LCD display. Check it out!
As a software engineer, I've used Visual Studio 2005 (for C# and VB.NET) and this announcement couldn't make me happier. I installed the bits and got the simulation visualizer working (in VS any debugging or output tool is called a visualizer). It is very very cool. I've been racking my brains how to introduce robotics into the corporate business space in a big way, like bulk purchasing of a product or like OS licensing (say 1000s of units?) - I have a few ideas - but now with this I get a no cost solution for software and a common building platform. I think, not to be too dramatic, that we may be looking at a breakthrough. I'll hold back my enthusiasm until my NXT arrives and I can get a Killer App working. Thanks for your blog!
As a matter of fact, I spent the day with running some of the tutorials against the NXT and the RCX and (after some trying, for the tutorials are still a little vague on some points), I got them running (for truth to tell, only one single tutorial on the NXT, as the NXT support is going to be completed yet in the next weeks according to the MS developers). The concept appears to be pretty state-of-the-art, featuring platform-indepent services that are configured by (XML-file based) dependency-injection - with that, I was able to run one and the same program source on the NXT AND the RCX with just using another small config file. All in all, the whole stuff looks rather promising (as long as one don't mind to be locked into Windows XP...).
Will try to create my first real NXT app tomorrow - stay tuned.
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http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=206574
The concept appears to be pretty state-of-the-art, featuring platform-indepent services that are configured by (XML-file based) dependency-injection - with that, I was able to run one and the same program source on the NXT AND the RCX with just using another small config file.
All in all, the whole stuff looks rather promising (as long as one don't mind to be locked into Windows XP...).
Will try to create my first real NXT app tomorrow - stay tuned.
Matthias