Toolkit for asynchronous programming emerges from robotics
You might think that a real-world implementation of something that emerged from a project at the Robotics division of Microsoft Research would have something to do with, perhaps, just maybe, a robot. But one of the big surprises at this year’s PDC was the emergence of a runtime toolkit for enterprise software developers that ostensibly enables a new — or, more accurately, unimplemented — method for dealing with very large scale tasks and problem-solving, that’s directly inspired by the way Microsoft is programming robots to deal with complex tasks dynamically.