It seems that the CCR I’d been waiting for is now out, and has been for a while. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it’s only available as part of the Microsoft Robotics Studio. It falls under the same licence as the Robotics Studio, and can be used in commercial apps (for a fee, I believe) – but why on earth isn’t it available as a standalone download with a simple free licence? Robotics Studio 1.0 is a nearly 50MB download, which is absurd if you’re only after the CCR.

It’s relatively little wonder that when searching for the CCR the most common hits are still for the Channel9 videos. I only found the download due to a helpful post in the newsgroups, and I already knew about the existence of the CCR beforehand. Anyone who is interesting in threading but happened to have missed the earlier videos would be forgiven for never hearing about the CCR.

Can you imagine if MS had bundled WCF or WPF as part of an “online games SDK” or something similar? It’s bizarre.

Come on, MS. Give the CCR a proper home, a proper download, and I suspect it’ll get some real momentum.