Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta 2 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. This release is an update that has the functionality of the previous Standard Edition with the addition of support for the Kinect sensor and a defined Reference Platform.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio can support a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform (if it has an embedded PC running Windows) or controlling it from a Windows PC through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.

In addition to providing support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta provides a Visual Programming Language (VPL) which allows developers to create applications simply by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas and wiring them together.

The powerful Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) provides a high-fidelity simulation environment powered by NVIDIA™ PhysX™ engine for running game-quality 3D simulations with real-world physics interactions.
tutorials that illustrate how to write applications ranging from simple "Hello Robot" to complex applications that simultaneously run on multiple robots.