Announcing the first official OpenZWave library for UWP

As a follow-up to my recent OpenZWave blogpost ( /post/2017/01/20/Using-OpenZWave-in-UWP-apps ), a few things has happened since.

First of all I’ve worked closely with the OpenZWave team, and we agreed to consolidate efforts. My library is now the official OpenZWave library for .NET and UWP, and has been moved out under the OpenZWave organization on GitHub:

       https://github.com/OpenZWave/openzwave-dotnet-uwp

At the same time the older .NET library has been removed from the main OpenZWave repository, so they can focus on the native parts of the library, and I’ve taken over the .NET effort.

To successfully support UWP and .NET, I wanted to achieve as close code compatibility as possible, and for maintainability also reuse as much C++ code as possible (both libraries are written in C++ – C++/CX for UWP and C++/CLI for .NET). The APIs for the two binaries should however be completely identical and the code you write against them the same. This meant a lot of refactoring, and breaking the original .NET a little. At the same time, I did a full API review, and cleaned it up to better follow the .NET naming guidelines. The overall API design hasn’t changed too much, and moving from the older .NET API shouldn’t be too much work (the original WinForms sample app was ported over with relatively little effort and is available in the repo as a reference as well).

However because of the many small breaking changes, the nuget package needs a major version increase.  I’ve just released the v2.0.0-beta1 package for you to start using. The API is release quality though, and should be very close to a final release. If you’ve done any OpenZWave dev, I encourage you to try it out and provide feedback.

Read the WIKI to see how to get started: https://github.com/OpenZWave/openzwave-dotnet-uwp/wiki

Or try out the sample applications included in the repository. So go grab the nuget package today and start Z-Waving!

                https://www.nuget.org/packages/OpenZWave/2.0.0-beta1

Note: If you are using IoTCore, beware that Microsoft pre-installs an OpenZWave to AllJoyn bridge. This bridge will grab your Serial Port, so make sure you disable this app prior to using the library. Second: The built in AllJoyn-ZWave service by Microsoft only supports the older Gen2 AeoTec adapter, whereas this library also works great with the Gen5 models.