Benefits

From OPC Labs Knowledge Base
Revision as of 15:06, 30 January 2018 by User (talk | contribs)


Support

  • We respond to every post on our Online Forums (http://www.opclabs.com/forum/index).
  • As opposed to many other vendors, our technical support is public, which means that any possible issues are visible on the Web and you can find them - and an advise on how to resolve them - without having to become a customer first. If your issue involves sensitive or confidential information, we can provide support to you via email.

Costs

  • no need to pay yearly to OPCF to stay closed-source. It gets cheaper to purchase the toolkit rather than paying annual OPC Foundation fees.
  • Perpetual license

API Design

The libraries are CLS-compliant
CLS (Common Language Specification) by Microsoft makes it possible to interact seamlessly with code written in all kinds of .NET-based languages, and that means not just C# (or VB.NET). Other OPC libraries are not CLS compliant.
  • "Made for .NET"
  • method overloads for short code
  • clear exception model


Developer Friendliness

  • debugger: does not show unnecessary private fields
  • Help integration
  • Intellisense
  • slow down UA keep-alive mechanisms when debugging


Goodies

  • formatting feature
  • assemblies have strong names
  • our installable and all bineries are code-signed (some security environments do not allow any unsigned code; OPCF does not sign).


Notices

  • data type inference in OPC UA Writes
  • automatically adjusts UA timing to debugger
  • connectivity explorer
  • Comprehensive Reference
  • Interoperability tested
  • Visual binding
  • Binary/xml serialization
  • Typesafe (strong typing)/generics
  • Low-ceremony API
  • Highly intuitive toolkit
  • .NET and COM interfaces are largely identical
  • API has high expressive power
  • OPC DA Quality Decoder included
  • Excel integration
  • Simple licensing - no hassles with lost licenses "tied" to a hardware
  • no config files necessary - just reference an assembly
  • Pre-installation of OPC Core Component not required
  • Pre-installation of UA Certificate Generator not required
  • No need to create/assign a certificate by a manual process
You can specify namespace URIs for OPC UA nodes
... and not namespaces indices. This is important, because the server can can change namespace indices between sessions. Other toolkits largely ignore this, and even give you examples where the node is specified with a hard-coded namespace index. Proper way of doing this is to look up the namespace index that corresponds to namespace URI, but that complicates the user code a lot. QuickOPC does this for you.
Examples are not just in C#
The examples that come with QuickOPC cover many different languages, not just C#. Specifically, the second most covered language is VB.NET. Other .NET-based libraries typically come with C# developers in mind only.