How did it come about?
In 2005, Tandy Trower, part of Bill Gates' startegic staff, was invited to numerous meetings with members of the robotics community. The upshot of all these meetings was that there was a total lack of a unified platform for developing robotics-based applications, with each hardware vendor supplying their own set of tools.
After discussing this with Gates, a proposal was drafted to create a development kit that could provide a consistent platform and tools that could be applied to a wide variety of robots.
Nine months later after a subsequent review the project was approved for product development. The official release of V1.0 was in December. The 2.0 release in November 2008 was renamed the product to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. The product has definitely helped Microsoft to be recognized as a significant player in the early emergent market.