I've been repeating the story that personal robotics will be the next revolution, on par with the PC revolution. I can't recall where I read this first, but it I can believe it. Guess who is jumping into the fray to help that prediction along? It's Microsoft. It's been announced in several places:

• At robots.net
• By Robert Scoble
• At ars.Technica
• and by Microsoft themselves

Here's the homepage for Microsoft Robotics Studio.

The notice at Robots.net has an interesting take on all this...

Their development tools are designed to lock the user into Microsoft's .NET programming languages (e.g. JScript, C#, Visual Basic) and MS Windows XP.

Sounds like MS :) I think I'd much rather use open source tools than getting locked into .NET programming.

Update 2006/06/21: Here's a good article about Microsoft's efforts in the robotics arena from an educator's perspective. The author quotes Microsoft's Tandy Trower saying:

"This is not about Microsoft trying to control the world. This is about Microsoft providing a very simple foundation that allows the community to step forward and exchange information with itself. It will allow the community to evolve on a quicker pathway, on a natural pathway that it’s already on, and it will help accelerate that process. What this is all about is Microsoft being able to help the industry bootstrap itself, you know, ignite itself toward the expectations that everybody has."