Premise Systems has been sold (to an unannounced, but apparently BIG, buyer) and they have released preview versions of both thier Hardware and Services Development Kit (HSDK) and MiniBroker that are .NET based.
I’ve spent some time playing with both the new HSDK.NET and Minibroker.NET and the productivity difference is stunning. It took me weeks to implement my Cestron to Premise bridge driver using the old HSDK. If I were to re-write it using the new HSDK.NET I could probably do it in a day.
The new MiniBroker is the thing that really has my juices going. While I love Premise, I’m not a huge fan of their Automation Browser UI, nor does their mSense technology work for me. Being able to craft my own UI in C# (or Flash or whatever) is key. I have a reasonable solution working today, written in C# against the old Minibroker using COM interop, but the impedence mis-match between C# and the COM interop approach is too high. The new Minibroker.NET is much more natural; to see what I mean look at the sample “Phil DHC“ posted in this thread. If you have Premise installed an you fire it up you’ll see that in just a few lines of code Phil was able to have a tree control displaying the Home topology on the left and a VisualStudio like Property Browser on the right.
If you are a home automation enthusiast, dealer, or installer, and you haven’t taken a close look at Premise yet, you should.
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