An Update from Tandy Trower, General Manager, Microsoft Robotics Group

It's November, so it must be time to get you a new update. While you will see some significant new features in this preview, from here we will be winding down and focused on finalizing what we have for version 1. If you encounter any significant issues after installing this latest preview, please post something to us in our newsgroup. Feature requests are still welcome, but we may save these for our next release.

New Security Support

Security is now available and can be enable through a simple HTTP webpage. This includes:

• Support for full authorization and encryption on the HTTP and TCP Microsoft Robotics Studio transports. This easy-to-use scheme uses well established design to secure MSRS service nodes.
• Assembly loading verification with checks for strongly signed and authenticode signed assemblies.

Visual Programming Language Improvements

We are still refining the user interface of our visual programming language. In this release you will see some nice visual changes as well as:

• New Properties viewer. While you can only set simple properties in this preview, this will become a mechanism you can use to set the initialization and configuration information for your services.
• Dramatically improved performance for loading and saving (and therefore also startup execution).
• New Switch activity that enables branching based on a value. This addition simplifies the If activity.

Simulation Improvements

Similarly we have refined our simulation visualization tool. This includes:

• Loading of complex OBJ mesh files and conversion to binary format sped up 100x.
• A new simulation user interface that allows selection of cameras and render modes.
• Improved support for simulated cameras.
• Fixes for issues when running the Intel 950 chipsets found in IBM and Toshiba notebooks.
• New wireframe visual mode. 
   

New Deployment Tool

We've added a new tool, DssDeploy, to make it easier for you to deploy runtime code using only the dependencies required for a particular manifest. DssDeploy creates a ZIP package with the necessary binaries and content for deploying your bits to a PC based robot or another PC, with the minimum files required.

Services Improvements

You'll find a variety of improvements to some of our sample services. For example, we have included a new LEGO NXT drive service that now uses the Generic Drive contract.