National Instruments LabVIEW has been de facto standard in automation programming. If you want to play with robotics seriously, you should try out LabVIEW rather than this MS prototype. I tried this MS Visual Programming Language that ships with MS Robotic Studio. It was slow, unintuitive, hard and slow to develop and only had very restricted set of ready-made functionality available. LabVIEW on the other hand is an integrated cross-platform development environment with 20-year history. You can program both desktop computers and various real-time hardware environments with the same language and same development environment. Of course not all functionality is available for real-time targets and dedicated FPGA chips as these only have limited functionality. The downside of LabVIEW is that it's not free but rather expensive. The language is also strictly closed source and National Instruments has been very strict not to release any source code for the runtime environment. Academica can get LabVIEW for reasonable price, for industry prices are rather high.
For more information on LabVIEW see official website and LabVIEW forum LAVA. LabVIEW Toolkit for LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT is available for free download (but you need LabVIEW to run it).
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National Instruments LabVIEW has been de facto standard in automation programming. If you want to play with robotics seriously, you should try out LabVIEW rather than this MS prototype. I tried this MS Visual Programming Language that ships with MS Robotic Studio. It was slow, unintuitive, hard and slow to develop and only had very restricted set of ready-made functionality available. LabVIEW on the other hand is an integrated cross-platform development environment with 20-year history. You can program both desktop computers and various real-time hardware environments with the same language and same development environment. Of course not all functionality is available for real-time targets and dedicated FPGA chips as these only have limited functionality. The downside of LabVIEW is that it's not free but rather expensive. The language is also strictly closed source and National Instruments has been very strict not to release any source code for the runtime environment. Academica can get LabVIEW for reasonable price, for industry prices are rather high.
For more information on LabVIEW see official website and LabVIEW forum LAVA. LabVIEW Toolkit for LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT is available for free download (but you need LabVIEW to run it).