| OPC Programming and Deployment Made Easy | | Print | |
|
“Ever-so-often” I stumble on a product that makes our jobs easier to manage (being a naturally lazy individual makes such a thing even more appealing). Having done OPC software development over the last years few years for various projects forced us to do some rather routine coding. When developing applications that will consume OPC data, it seemed like we were writing more code reading and writing tags and less application code.
As our software group transitioned to using C# and VB.NET to Microsoft.NET platform, our selection tools started to open up. One of the tools we started to leverage was a product called OPCSystems.NET by Open Automation Software http://www.opcsystems.net . OPCSystems.NET is a suite of tools that enable a RAD (Rapid Application Development) to your SCADA and HMI projects. OPCSystems.NET provides a toolset that allows me to place a TextBox on a Windows Form or ASP.NET application and associate an OPC data tag for reading or writing. In the old days of Visual Basic 6.0 or C++, this may have taken several lines of code (if we promoted code reuse) or hundred lines of code (in the case of C++). With OPCSystems.NET, this takes “0” lines of code. At the same time, with a little configuration, this OPC tag can be trended, contain alarm limits and be part of a recipe configuration. The features I describe above alarming, data binding and trending would be expected in an OPC package. My enthusiasm began to wax even further when I realized the distribution of the new client could be commenced without worrying about DCOM/OPC configuration. So how is this possible? Part of the OPCSystems.NET package is a service that runs on your server machine that handles the communications with the OPC Server and then spills data to your application using .NET Remoting.
Each textbox, data control or alarm display is completely free of any DCOM security constraints. Deploy your application using a MSI Installer or Click-Once deployment and never worry about DCOM configuration, ever…. I promise! OPC Foundation http://www.opcfoundation.org
|
