Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Customer Solution Case Study
Controls Maker Uses New Development Tools
to Build Products for Untapped Market
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 smallbusiness 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 highperformance, 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
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.
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.
“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
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 highperformance 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 Webbased 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.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
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Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Johnson
Controls products and services, call
(414) 524-1200 or visit the Web site at:
www.johnsoncontrols.com
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
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.”
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s
most popular development environment for
designing, developing, and testing nextgeneration 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.
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.
For more information on Visual Studio 2005,
go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
Acquire Visual Studio:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy
“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.”
Software and Services

© 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
Products
− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team
Edition for Software Developers

Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0
− Microsoft Internet Explorer 6