Robotics Developer Studio 4 (Microsoft RDS) is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers to help them easily create robotic applications across a wide variety of hardware.

Microsoft RDS includes a lightweight asynchronous services-oriented runtime, a set of visual authoring and simulation tools, as well as templates, tutorials, and sample code to help you get started.

With RDS you can:

• Interact with robots using Windows or Web-based user interfaces. You can remotely monitor and control a robot using HTML and JavaScript across the Web.
• Leverage Visual Programming Language (VPL), which enables you to program using drag-and-drop.
• Gets started quickly with Reference Platform design, allowing you to define a minimum set of components and associated software services.
• Use the 3D physics-based Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) to create applications without hardware.
• Use up to four Kinect hardware sensors via the Kinect for Windows SDK.

Supported operating systems: Windows 7

In addition to using Robotics Developer Studio as a stand-alone development environment, it can be used with any of the Visual Studio 2010 Editions, including the Express Edition. Note that you should install Visual Studio before Robotics Developer Studio so that the New Service Wizard installs correctly.