Professional Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio

Introduction

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) introduces a new way to program robots in the Windows environment. It attempts to bring some order to the chaos that has marred the field of robotics, at least as far as Windows-based applications are concerned. If it meets its objectives, you will see the emergence of a common standard for robotics software in the next few years. This is potentially very significant, and it is a great time to get in on the ground floor.

MRDS was developed over a relatively short period of time by a very small team. It is not your average Microsoft product. In an unusual move for Microsoft, key portions of the code for MRDS are available in source form. This makes it readily extensible and offers many opportunities for programmers, whether you are a hobbyist, a research student, or an employee of a large corporation, to write new services that integrate directly into the system and to easily share these services with others.

The speed of development and the limited resources of the MRDS team has meant that documentation has tended to lag behind. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to MRDS for experienced C# programmers. It contains a wealth of examples. We did not set out to duplicate the existing MRDS documentation, but instead to complement it.

Because programming with MRDS is so fundamentally different from what you might have been used to in the past, getting started can be difficult. This is where a good textbook with well-constructed ...