A new version of Microsoft’s Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) has been released. This with a new twist: it’s completely free. Download it here.

MRDS is a platform for modelling and interacting with robots (both hardware “real” robots, and software simulated ones). This package has a lot of potential, and in it’s early days was also responsible for the birth of the CCR/DSS toolkit (which is in a nutshell, a lightweight asynchronous service oriented runtime), and is the core messaging and threading engine of MRDS, previously sold separately, but now just integrated with MRDS R3.