Holy Moly! Could Microsoft release fewer cool products for a while please? :). There has been so many exciting technologies coming out lately that it seems like there is hardly enough time to investigate them all. The latest edition to this group of great technologies? Microsoft Robotics Studio.
There are a few things that excite me about this specific technology (from what limited investigation I have done on it during my lunch break today):
1) It is enabled for both Visual Studio _and_ the Express products (you can even use it from IronPython).
2) Robotic simulation. If you don't have the hardware to play around with it, Microsoft Robotics Studio includes robot simulation using DirectX that you can use to programatically build a robot and show how your "software" would work with the robot. I'm slightly jealous because this was one of the ideas I had behind my next game (take this Studio and make a "battle game" around it, and that was Tanks).
So, I obviously need to play around with this some more. Perhaps I'll still build Tanks now that a good amount of the "leg work" has been done for me through Microsoft Robotics Studio. I'm wondering since Robotics Studio has its own runtime and such, if I can embed that runtime within a game so that I can build a game around it. Heck, that sounds like a fun project as a matter of fact. Perhaps I've found my next endeavor after Spaceballs is finished.
Enjoy!