The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. Key features and benefits of the Microsoft Robotics Studio environment include: end-to-end Robotics Development Platform , lightweight services-oriented runtime, and a scalable and extensible platform. Microsoft Robotics Studio targets a wide audience in an attempt to accelerate robotics development and adoption. An important part of the offering is the simulation runtime. The Microsoft Robotics Studio Runtime provides a runtime environment that has been designed to accommodate the needs of a broad set of robotics applications. To meet these requirements, the Microsoft Robotics Studio Runtime provides a service oriented architecture which combines key aspects of traditional Web-based architecture with pieces from Web Services to provide a highly flexible and lightweight, distributed application model.