I'm not a robotics nerd, but there are 2 reasons I care about this announcement:

  1. Marc Mercuri is one of the guys behind this, and he planned and built Tafiti – the guy is smart!
  2. Mary Jo Foley says you should grab a copy and if MJF says grab it... grab it.

"Businesses have discovered that the Microsoft Robotics Studio includes technology that is suited for programming multicore, distributed systems. Specifically, businesses are quite interested in the concurrency and coordination (CCR) and decentralized software services (DSS) runtimes that are currently embedded in the robotics toolkit, Trower said. These runtimes are part of the evolving multicore/distributed programming model into which Microsoft and other tech vendors starting to plow lots of money and development work."