At last month's TechEd US Developer event in Orlando, I attended a small dinner with a number of Microsoft executives from different development areas. There were three tables of eight people and one of these execs was at each table - S. Somasegar, Sr. VP of the Developer Division;  Tandy Trower, General Manager for MS Robotics (and has been at MS for 26 years!) and Robert Wahbe, Corporate VP for Connected Systems.

We did a round robin -- appetizers at one table, main course at the next and dessert at the third. This way, we could spend time with each of the execs.

I was a little worried about sitting at Tandy Trower's table since I know very little about MS Robotics, though I ended up having the most fun there. I was sitting next to Tandy and addition to tech talk, Tandy and I have a lot  in common and were also talking about Vermont, gardening and blueberry picking.

But what was most fascinating for me was to revisit an "aha!" moment I had last fall about Microsoft Robotics during a luncheon presentation at ReMix in Boston. I actually wrote about this in a blog post titled ReMix07 Boston: In between the sessions. John Williams, from MIT, did a presentation on how MIT's AutoID Labs was using some of the Robotics APIs to manage a host of asynchronous processes and also leverage it's light weight WCF-like API for services to build an ID system to track products through the entire chain from the manufacturer's warehouse to a retail stores floor and to it's eventual sale.

If you think about it, a robot might perform a lot of actions simultaneously and many of these actions are part of a workflow. Imagine all of the signals necessary for a human-like robot to bend and raise an arm. And at the same time it might be moving forward or beeping or even cleaning your floors. The API that handles this is called the Coordination and Concurrency Runtime. The services API is called "Decentralized Software Services". While Tandy was explaining it to me I asked if he knew about this MIT project and he laughed because another person sitting at the table had also seen that presentation and had since adopted these APIs to completely restructure his company's software (which is used all over the world).

When I arrived home, I was happy to find the latest MSDN Magazine (June 2008) issue with an article on Robotics that was aimed at sharing this same understanding. The article, Simulating The World With Microsoft Robotics Studio, was written by the brainy Sara Morgan who has written .NET books on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Studio  .

The lead paragraph for the article focused on the same issue - trying to spread the word that there are some amazing tools inside of Robotics Studio that can be used for business applications.

Don't let the name fool you. Microsoft® Robotics Studio (MSRS) is more than just a way to play with robots. Released almost two years ago by Microsoft Research and virtually ignored by everyday business application developers, MSRS allows you to build service-based applications for a wide range of hardware devices. The toolkit includes a runtime that should be instantly familiar to Windows® Communication Framework (WCF) developers. Additionally, it features a Visual Programming Language (VPL) tool and Visual Simulation Environment (VSE).

The article is a great place to get started with Robotics Studio or just to get your head wrapped around what it's all about. there's also an MSDN site, Microsoft Robotics.