.NET And COM Client Toolkit: QuickOPC

QuickOPC is a set of COM and .NET OPC components that simplify the task of integrating OPC into applications. Reading a value from OPC Data Access or OPC Unified Architecture server, or writing a data value can be achieved in just one or two lines of code.

QuickOPC OPC client tools provide a radically new approach to access OPC data. Traditionally, OPC required complicated code, no matter whether you used OPC custom or automation interfaces. OPC Server objects must be instantiated, OPC Group objects must be created and manipulated, OPC Items must be added and managed properly, and subscriptions must be established and maintained. Too many lines of error-prone .NET code must have been written to achieve a simple goal – reading or writing a value.

The components can be used from various COM tools, NET languages and environments. The available examples for .NET show how the components can be used from C#, Visual Basic.NET, managed C++, and F#. Windows Forms, ASP.NET pages, Windows services, console applications, and WPF applications are all supported. For example. you can develop HMI-s, or OPC Loggers with QuickOPC easily. 

For COM development, the available examples show how the components can be used from Visual Basic (VB, VB6), C/C++, VBScript (e.g. in ASP/IIS, or Windows Script Host), JScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA, e.g. in Excel), Visual FoxPro (VFP), Delphi (Object Pascal), REAL Studio (REALbasic), Xbase (Xbase++), T-SQL (SQL Server) and other tools. Any tool or language that supports COM Automation is supported.

The development tool we have targeted primarily is Visual Studio 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2017. Both 32-bit and 64-bit applications can be created.

Features:

• Works from any .NET tool, including thick client applications, ASP.NET pages, and WPF. 
• Stateless component makes writing the client code easy.
• See Product Page for details.

Specifications:

• OPC Data Access 1.0, 2.0. 3.0
• OPC XML-DA 1.01
• OPC Alarms&Events 1.x
• OPC Common
• OPC Unified Architecture – Generic/Data
• OPC Unified Architecture – Alarms&Conditions

QuickOPC also supports OPC UA Complex Data, i.e. encoding and decoding of extension objects, based on data type dictionary information from the model.

With Excel Option for QuickOPC, you can set up a communication link betweeb Excel and any OPC server, without any programming – just with drag-and-drop.

QuickOPC is also available as NuGet package.

QuickOPC allows development of OPC compliant applications, and it is the first .NET-based development toolkit for OPC-UA that has been certified as such by the OPC Foundation. As toolkits cannot be certified directly, the certification process has been made using an application (Connectivity Explorer) that comes with QuickOPC and has been created using QuickOPC.