Controls Maker Uses New Development Tools to Build ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Manufacturing

Customer Profile

Johnson Controls, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a global market leader in automotive systems and facility management and control. The Fortune 100 company has about 120,000 employees.

Business Situation

Johnson Controls needed new development tools to enable the design of cost-effective, high-performance building controls that could be sold into the small-business market.

Solution

Johnson Controls became an early adopter of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and used tools such as the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 to design high-performance, small devices for controlling building facilities.

Benefits

■ The .NET Compact Framework 2.0 enables new, lower-cost devices

■ Developer efficiency is improved

■ Web services and security are easier to implement

| | |“Visual Studio 2005 provides a more streamlined, integrated environment that helps our development team be more efficient.”

Alan Bronikowski, Lead Staff Engineer, Systems Products Engineering, Johnson Controls

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| | | |Johnson Controls is one of the world’s best-known names for automotive and building control systems. |

| | | |The company, which has successfully placed its products in large facilities around the globe, wanted |

| | | |to develop building control devices for smaller businesses operating buildings of 50,000 square feet |

| | | |or less. To do this, Johnson Controls wanted better and more powerful development tools. It became an|

| | | |early adopter of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 in order|

| | | |to create a new class of high-performance, low-cost building control devices for smaller customers. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

Johnson Controls is a leading global provider of automotive and facility management and control systems. The company provides systems and services that include comfort, energy, and security management for commercial, educational, and government buildings. The Fortune 100 organization reported 2004 sales of U.S.$26.6 billion.

A core Johnson Controls technology is the Metasys® building management system, a combination of electronic components and software programs that helps automate the core systems in buildings so building owners and managers can maximize comfort, safety, and energy efficiency. The Metasys system also collects historical data on the usage, behavior, and performance of core systems, helping building operators to optimize equipment maintenance and make good decisions on efficiently managing buildings.

One of the key building blocks in most Metasys solutions is the supervisory controller, or Network Automation Engine, which monitors and orchestrates the actions of a building’s various electrical and mechanical systems. In 2003, Johnson Controls made a strategic decision to build its supervisory controller on the Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded operating system in order to deliver a range of features and benefits to its commercial product line, including support for standard network protocols, access to building controls through Internet-based technology, integration with a range of systems and devices, and the ability to scale to dozens or even hundreds of devices.

The products using the Windows XP Embedded–based supervisory controller were targeted for organizations operating large buildings of 100,000 square feet or more, and these companies were receptive to the sophistication and price point of the Johnson Controls products.

However, there was a growing market of customers with smaller buildings who did not need or want the features in Johnson Controls’ higher-end products. Johnson Controls wanted to find technology to support the creation of simpler and lower-cost devices that would appeal to smaller customers. The company needed development tools that would be efficient to use so it could control the costs of new, smaller devices.

Solution

Johnson Controls, which had experience with previous versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio® development system, became an early adopter of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers. The company plans to use Visual Studio 2005 as its primary development toolkit for creating products across its entire product line. “Microsoft is the only vendor that has a complete development line from the smallest embedded devices to the largest enterprise configurations,” says Dan Curtis, Engineering Manager for Johnson Controls. “We can now share code across all devices that make up a building automation system.”

Benefits

The use of the tools in Visual Studio provides several important benefits to Johnson Controls. The company’s developers used the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0—a version of the Microsoft .NET Framework that is part of Visual Studio 2005—to quickly create a new and smaller, yet high-performance environment for supervisory controllers. This enables Johnson Controls to build very compact and cost-effective devices for the smaller-building market. Compared to prior versions of the Microsoft development tools, Visual Studio 2005 brings a broader set of device development tools into one integrated development environment so that Johnson Controls developers can debug both managed and native components of a device in one tool. This speeds development times and helps Johnson Controls get products to market faster with less cost. The new .NET Compact Framework technology also enables more efficient development of Web services.

More Efficient Processes Help Target New Market

The .NET Compact Framework 2.0 provides many significant enhancements as compared to the first version, enabling Johnson Controls to target the small-building market by providing the tools its developers need to create solutions on small devices.

“The performance of devices running on the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 has been significantly improved,” says Kim Miller, Project Manager for the new, smaller supervisory controller environment. “We have what are known as ‘Critical to Quality’ targets that we have to reach before a device is considered ready for use by our customers. For example, how long it takes for an alarm to show up, or how long it takes a user to log onto the system to view data from a controller.

“There are 12 of these targets that we pay particularly close attention to. After we started using the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for our development, we noticed dramatic improvement in most of these numbers over .NET Compact Framework 1.0. This makes it much easier for us to get new products to our smaller business customers at an advantageous price point.”

Developer Efficiency Is Improved

With Visual Studio 2005, Johnson Controls developers can now debug both managed and native components from one integrated development environment. “The debugging that takes place with Visual Studio 2005 is much more efficient—and that, in turn, helps our developers be more productive,” says Dale Larson, Staff Engineer for Microsoft .NET Compact Framework in the Johnson Controls controllers.

“This new capability means that we now have the ability to attach a device and debug it right within Visual Studio, when previously we would have had to use Microsoft Platform Builder,” Larson says. “It is a simpler, more streamlined process that helps our developers work faster and more effectively, and it saves us time and investment in training because our developers only need to work within one tool.”

Web Services and Security Are Easier

to Implement

Johnson Controls is also benefiting from new features in Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 that make it easier to create Web services and implement security for building controls.

The Metasys system architecture has a Web-based system that simplifies day-to-day building operations by allowing users to log onto any Web browser to check on building conditions. The architecture uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser for its user interface. Engineering, commissioning, and monitoring the system can all be done through this interface. This is particularly advantageous because most customer enterprises consist of one or more sites, and each site consists of one or more Metasys devices.

Web services, which facilitate the communications between remote devices and the Metasys system components, are an integral component of this architecture. Johnson Controls was able to create Web services in the past, but the new technology in Visual Studio 2005 makes them easier

to develop.

On the devices, Johnson Controls also used XML serialization, supported by the .NET Compact Framework, to enable the conversion of XML-based Web services, documents, and streams to common language runtime objects and vice versa. “In the past, without this feature, we had to write a lot of code to transfer objects to and from XML for each message that needed to be sent. It was very labor-intensive to take an internal object and represent it as XML and then reconstruct it into a .NET object,” says Alan Bronikowski, Lead Staff Engineer for Systems Products Engineering at Johnson Controls. “The XML serialization streamlines this process.”

Additionally, Johnson Controls is using the expanded cryptographic support in Visual Studio 2005; the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, which now includes X.509 certificates; MD5 and SHA1 hashing; RC2, RC4, 3DES, and DES symmetric key encryption; and RSA and DSA asymmetric key encryption.

“Overall, Visual Studio 2005 provides a more streamlined, integrated environment that helps our development team be more efficient,” says Bronikowski. “We anticipate moving most of our projects in the future to this development environment.”

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern, service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to:

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio:

msdn.vstudio/howtobuy

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| |Software and Services

■ Products

− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers |Technologies

− Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0

− Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, the Visual Studio logo, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published October 2005 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Johnson Controls products and services, call (414) 524-1200 or visit the Web site at:

“The debugging that takes place with Visual Studio 2005 is…a simpler, more streamlined process that helps our developers work faster and more effectively….”

Dale Larson, Staff Engineer for Microsoft .NET Compact Framework , Johnson Controls

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