Where is a good place to start with making an application in .NET that communicates through OPC? [closed]

Question

Where is a good place to start with making an application in .NET that communicates through OPC?

Goldarn

Answer 1

You can find a good article and a library to start with here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/opcdotnet.aspx

Goldarn

Answer 2

The Code Project article is from the early days of .NET and may not be the best option today.

Alternatives include OPC Foundation's own .NET API (requires OPC Foundation membership) or several commercial products. OPCconnect.com lists a number of these.

Threepiece

Answer 3

Be careful. I haven't used an OPC API yet that properly conforms to any sort of calling conventions, particularily in the area of freeing memory (COM, as documented, or otherwise). Expect a month of debugging memory leaks.

Fathomless

I agree, I did some tuning and profiling with the one I link to and I had to fix several (small) issues as I went along, but that library does work. It is a shame OPC is such a huge piece of crap to begin with, but sometimes a necessary evil (office politics here). – Goldarn

Answer 4

SoftwareToolbox's OPCData.NET (http://www.opcdata.net/) claims to be a 100% Managed code solution for OPC Client. SoftwareToolbox also has some other OPC libraries to help with binding OPC data to forms and web interfaces.

Basso

Answer 5

If buying a comercial toolkit is an option I've used the Northern Dynamics server toolkit and it worked fine. A toolkit will take away a lot of the issues mentioned in the other questions (or at least you should get support if there's a problem).

They've wrapped the OPC protocol up nicely so it makes it easy to use. See one of my questions here for a type-safe Variant wrapper that I wrote to help with this.

Dumbfound