A couple weeks ago I decided it was time to get my hands dirty and bring Oslo to bear on an area I’m becoming increasingly interested in: Home Automation. Specifically, I'm creating a home automation application/service that allows people to control household appliances and functions over the Internet. Part of my job as an Oslo product planner is to understand the gap between our vision and the current state of the bits that customers can touch and while we have many tools to help us do that, nothing beats dogfooding for directly experiencing the joy and pain of early bits.

SideNote{"This gap always exists and is generally larger for efforts that are part of a long term strategy, but more on that later."}

Aside from having a personal interest in home automation, smart grids, etc. I chose this domain as my first Oslo project for a couple reasons:

  1. Broadly Accessible: we all know what it means to turn lights/appliances on and off
  2. Real World: this is a real industry (just a special case of device control in general) with real ISVs building software for it
  3. Manageable Scope: the X10 Specification defines a very concrete set of boundaries
  4. Not Microsoft: not an example of MS using Oslo to build/drive our own frameworks (Doug Purdy's Mservice is a good example of that)
  5. Not Enterprise: Oslo has value to application development in general, not just enterprise application development.

For my approach I decided to follow the bits. That is, the current state of the bits (and our words) leads one down a particular path of exploration and I want to know what that feels like. In the next post I'll lay out the details of that approach, some key capabilities the app has to deliver and mappings to specific Oslo components.

Oh yeah, Oslo really is controlling my house (at least my bedroom). Here's a screenshot of my DSL controlling an X10 device driver and displaying the output from the driver on the right.

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