Jacobs describes this "work of genius" as a service-oriented application model built on two overlapping technologies called Decentralized Software Services (DSS) and the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR). CCR/DSS was jointly developed by Microsoft engineers Henrik F Nielsen and George Chrysanthakopoulos, a "Lennon-McCartney, Morrissey-Marr pairing of gearheads that isn't often seen in software," according to Jacobs.
The CCR/DSS application model consists of "ubiquitous state-driven services." He continues. "Each service has a little bulletin board of richly-typed key/value pairs and can trigger events whenever a value is changed. Services can be instantiated anywhere where there is a lightweight service host (such as a PC, microprocessor, browser, or smartphone) and can register themselves as visible to other services, either by kind or identity."
"The idea of a constellation of communicating, state-driven services isn't necessarily revolutionary, but [Nielsen's and Chrysanthakopoulos'] conception and execution of that idea is," adds Jacobs.
So why is this revolutionary technology tucked away inside Robotics Studio? Aside from the fact that robotics fits well with a state-driven application model, Jacobs suggests that, from Microsoft's perspective, it simply didn't fit "temporally or politically" with the .NET Framework 3.0 development and the package isn't large enough to be a stand-alone product.
Jacobs likens the current state of CCR/DSS to "a 1966 VW Bug fitted with a turbocharged Porsche engine." The documentation leaves a lot to be desired, but that's okay because "we know how to pop the hood."
Read Jacobs's full blog post
here. Among other activities, Jacobs is currently writing a book about programming distributed applications which is expected to be published by Microsoft Press.
Additional information on Microsoft's Robotics Studio is available in our
previous coverage, and from the
Robotics Studio wiki. MSDN has also published an extensive set of
on-demand video tutorials.
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