Welcome to July CTP of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

Welcome to the July Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008. This is the 2^nd CTP and like the previous, which was released in April, this one has a lot of new features and improvements. Some of the features are mentioned here but there are many more. For a complete list, please see Whats New?.

New Samples and Tutorials

This CTP contains a variety of new samples and tutorials that illustrate functionality ranging from discovering DSS nodes using UPnP to embedding the simulation environment in a custom Windows Forms application to simulated 4x4-drive.

There are also new samples illustrating how to write your own transport binding and a variety of other features.

Simulation and 64-bit Machines

Simulation now runs on 64-bit systems using the Microsoft Windows-32-on-Windows-64 (WOW64) subsystem. To use simulation on 64-bit machines, make sure you use dsshost32.exe which forces the WOW64 mode.

Visual Studio Project Wizards

The Visual Studio Project Wizards have been rewritten to make it much simpler to create new service projects directly from Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Project wizards are provided for VB.Net and C# targeting .NET Framework.

Much Faster DSS Proxy Generation

The DssProxy tool has been completely rewritten to simplify the generation of service proxy assemblies and to make it much faster to compile services. In addition, the tool chain for writing services for .NET Compact Framework has been simplified to no longer need a companion service project targeting the desktop version of .NET Framework. This makes development for .NET Compact Framework much easier.

DSS Log Analyzer

The DSS Log Analyzer is a preview of a powerful new debugging and monitoring tool that can visualize and analyze message exchanges between services sent within a DSS node or across nodes. In addition to showing the actual messages that have been sent it also provides message correlations, time lines, and illustrates how multiple message interactions are causally linked over time.

Embedded Visual Simulation Environment

In addition to having a stand-alone UI, the Visual Simulation Environment can now be embedded in other applications. This enables other applications to show the Visual Simulation Environment as part of their application.

As always we are looking forward to your comments and suggestions on our MSDN forums so keep them coming!

Tandy Trower and the Microsoft Robotics Team