Azure Sphere dev here. Like any early project, we had to make many strategic choices on where to invest limited development time in. There are an endless number of features and platforms we'd love to support, but Visual Studio is an obvious first environment to target. I can't give you a timeline, but we're definitely investing in cross-platform tools.

I must admit I'm disappointed Seeed set such a high price for the dev kit, but there will be more boards in the future.

Thanks for the response. This makes more sense now. I’m very excited about your project because the #1 reason I am apprehensive of IoT for my clients is because of its dismal security. It’s also the reason I only use HomeKit for my House.

Keep it up! This level of multi level security is much needed.

I hope a whole ecosystem springs around it given it’ll be built on a solid foundation.

As a software person, this gives me more options even though it’s hardware.

Out of curiosity, what are the features of HomeKit that give you confidence in its security? I ask so I can have another data point in my mind.

It's definitely our goal to have a large ecosystem, of both hardware and software.

From day one, HomeKit had hardware PKI (and strong crypto with a hardware security module on all their devices). All their authentication and messaging was fully end-to-end encrypted, but again, all _in hardware_. [1]

But the beauty of it was, you never felt that complexity in software as a customer. It's the proverbial Apple product. The tradeoff is, because you need this special hardware HomeKit chip, the ecosystem is pretty dull, or too expensive. And that's held back HomeKit adoption.

After playing chicken with the industry for years, Apple finally gave in and is allowing software HomeKit devices to get certified now. That actually does away with some of the security IMO. But that's ok, it bothers me slightly less to have HomeKit software based lights. Whereas, I wouldn't compromise on that when it comes to security (like locks on my doors, or the garage door).

Hope that helps.

While I've had aspirations to get more into home automation from the business side, most of my experience is as a consumer, so weigh my input that way. :-)

[1] HomeKit Accessory Protocol: https://developer.apple.com/support/homekit-accessory-protoc...

[2] NodeJS Implementation of it to emulate things: https://github.com/KhaosT/HAP-NodeJS

Link? Because that’s very surprising and out of character, especially for a new project.

Update: found link https://m.seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052

Well that didn’t burst my bubble but definitely shrunk it quite a bit. Hopefully they’re building VS code plugins too.

> Azure Sphere looks promising but the Microsoft $85 Linux dev board SDK requires a Windows 10 device with Visual Studio for development.

LOL. :)