Microsoft just announced that Robotics Studio was released. With this new cool stuff, apps can be developed using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Express C# and VB and even IronPython. Some of the supported HW is Lego Mindstorm RCX and NXT, iRobot Roomba, Phidgets, fishertechnik, and many more.

Isn't it just freakin' cool that I can sit in front of my old Visual Studio and C# environment and start programming robotics? I definitely think so.

You can download Robotics Studio here and see some press releases here and here.

Last week I participated in a very interesting train-the-trainer event organized by Microsoft in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. First of all, I noticed the excellent quality of our trainers, Keith Brown from Pluralsight and Jason Olson from Microsoft. Then, of course, it was the course itself: Windows Longhorn Server. I can tell you right now that it rocks. In addition to the already "classic" stuff like WFC, WF, and WCS, Longhorn Server comes with a lot of very interesting things like IIS 7, WAS, transactional file system, transactional registry (both based on the Kernel Transaction Manager - KTM), improved networking (including OOTB support for IPv6), improved file system (remote differential compression, common log file system, symbolic links), and many more. Not to mention stuff like server core (the ability to install LHS without the GUI, only with the minimum set of components required to play a role like DNS, DHCP, AD or file server), high performance computing, clustering, virtualization, and terminal services (the most spectacular improvement here is in my opinion the TS gateway). For the operations side there is also improved management, PowerShell (think about it as a command shell on steroids... well ... on a consistent amount of steroids) and many more. Finally, I had a unique chance to sit a room with people coming for literally half the planet and it was awesome.

Jason has some "LHS feature of the week" stuff going on in his blog. For all of you interested in the new stuff in LHS I encourage you to take a look at his blog.

And of course the location was Amsterdam, a city that surprises me every time I get there (and believe me, I'm already over the red light district + crack and the like stuff :) ). Somehow, in the past four years I ended up at least once per year in this amazing city. All in all, it was a fantastic week.