What am I talking about?  Well, the folks over in Microsoft Robotics continue to crank out versions of software for creating some cool robotic stuff.  They announced last week the release of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 CTP April is now available. What is even more interesting is that it appears that enterprise customers are starting to take an interest in Robotics stuff as well.  From the article..

“We’re seeing interested in the enterprise space,” Trower said, “for mail handling, financial trading, scientific modeling” and other business applications.

Businesses have discovered that the Microsoft Robotics Studio includes technology that is suited for programming multicore, distributed systems. Specifically, businesses are quite interested in the concurrency and coordination (CCR) and decentralized software services (DSS) runtimes that are currently embedded in the robotics toolkit, Trower said. These runtimes are part of the evolving multicore/distributed programming model into which Microsoft and other tech vendors starting to plow lots of money and development work.

Trower’s team has improved the distributed computational capabilities of the forthcoming version of the toolkit, he said, by building in support for distributed language integrated queries (LINQ), “which reduces network utilization and simplifies service authoring,” according to Microsoft’s April 9 press release.

“In the Microsoft Robotics Studio, you see the new programming model we are creating at Microsoft,” Trower said.

Very interesting.  I had been operating under the impression that this was kind of a "Lego Mindstorm" on steroids type of thing.  Entirely my fault and grossly inaccurate, but robotics (or hardware for that matter) has never really been my thing and I am not much of a gadget freak either, so I had not paid much attention beyond the headlines.  But after reading the article, it is obvious that some very interesting things are going on that have impact in my world as well.  After having watched Terminator 3 again this weekend (slow weekend for sure! - thanks FX) I see now that there may be a lot of "potential" to this whole robot thing, way beyond vacuum cleaners!  As a result, I'm preparing now for my role as a chrome polisher for my robotic master in the new world order.