Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are networks of cooperating tiny wireless devices having computational, communication and sensing capabilities. To effectively program WSNs, specific high-level frameworks exist that make transparent the low-level mechanisms of sensor platforms. However, deployment of applications developed by such frameworks onto real WSNs is a challenge, specifically as some design and implementation choices can be carefully tuned only after application testing, which is well-known to be non practicable atop WSNs. This paper proposes a simulation-based approach for designing WSN applications based on the Building Management Framework (BMF). A BMF-based design can be evaluated on the Castalia simulator before its deployment. Such an evaluation provides important performance measurements such as data delivery ratio and energy consumption with respect to the scale of the network, the duty cycle and the BMF operating modes. Simulation results can allow to finely tune the WSN application parameters for an optimal deployment and execution.