What's new in QuickOPC 2018.3

See also: Versions; Previous version: What's new in QuickOPC 2018.2

Internal version number: 5.54

Key changes:

• .NET Standard

Targeting

• QuickOPC now also targets .NET Standard. Supported runtime currently is .NET Core (2.0.5, 2.0.6 or 2.0.7) on Microsoft Windows and Linux, although other runtimes and operating systems may work as well. Only OPC UA is supported when targeting .NET Standard. See Development Platforms in the documentation, for a table of functionalities available on each platform. In newly created licenses, the .NET Standard development platform is available in Professional and Ultimate editions.
• Development tools: For .NET Standard development, besides Visual Studio 2017, JetBrains Rider and .NET Core CLI tools are among the intended primary development tools.
• .NET runtimes: Removed .NET Framework 4.5.2 from the list of supported .NET runtimes (use .NET Framework 4.6.2 instead).
• .NET runtimes: Removed .NET Framework 4.6 from the list of supported .NET runtimes (use .NET Framework 4.6.2 instead).
• Development tools: Visual Studio 2012 removed from the list of primary development tools. It will likely still work for most tasks, though.

Delivery

• When targeting .NET Standard, the only delivery vehicle for the libraries themselves is the NuGet feed from http://www.nuget.org.
• Examples for .NET Standard are provided in form of downloadable .ZIP and .TGZ archives (if you are on Windows, you also still get them through the QuickOPC installer). Links to the example archive files are in the documentation (in the Examples section), and on the Web site.

Licensing

• It is now possible to embed the license key as managed resource in one of application's assemblies. When this approach chosen, no additional licensing-related steps are needed in order to run the application when deployed on the target machine.

Installation and Uninstallation

• The installation packages (for Windows) have been renamed to contain "Windows" in their name, e.g. QuickOPC-2018.3-Windows-Full.exe.

Component Improvements

• Added AllowSha1SignedCertificates property to the UACertificateAcceptancePolicy class. Determines whether certificates signed with SHA-1 message digest algorithm can be accepted.
• Added MinimumCertificateKeySize property to the UACertificateAcceptancePolicy class. Determines the minimum length of the certificate's public key.
• Added UseCustomHttpsCertificateValidation property to the UAClientEngineParameters class. Determines whether the certificates used for HTTPS communication will be validated by the component, or using the system default rules.
• When performing OPC UA application discovery on a given host, endpoint URLs with schemes that are known to be not supported by the OPC UA stack or .NET runtime are silently skipped, resulting in faster discovery and better error diagnostic in some cases.
• Error messages resulting from OPC UA SDK actions now contain a report, detailing the exceptions and SDK traces gathered during the action.
• Added an implicit conversion from UAMessageSecurityModes to UAEndpointSelectionPolicy.

Component Refactorings

• Setting an OPC UA certificate acceptance policy specific to an endpoint is no longer supported, as it cannot be reliably implemented due to limitations of the underlying UA stack. You can set the certificate acceptance policy globally.

User Interface

• Added Console Interaction Provider, automatically selected in user-interactive applications that have no GUI windows. With it, console-based applications can now interact with the user for accepting HTTPS and instance certificates, approving certificate domain mismatches, etc.

Instrumentation

• Improved OPC UA logging associated with HTTPS certificate validation.

Tools

Connectivity Explorer

• In the Point Editor window (Browse tab), context menu on the "OPC Unified Architecture" node now has a command that allows configuring the global Endpoint Selection Policy (applies when a specific policy is not set on the endpoint).
• In the Point Editor window (Browse tab), context menu on the "OPC Unified Architecture" node now has a command that allows configuring the global Certificate Acceptance Policy.