This article has been inspired by an e-mail conversation we have recently had with a customer. He had written a piece of code "from the scratch" that connected to his OPC Data Access server, and was able to obtain the data he needed to store in a database. He therefore had doubts about the value and usefulness of a library such as QuickOPC; it appeared to him that the task of writing an OPC client is quite easy.
During the course of a discussion, we have identified quite a lot of points that his code was lacking. Here are some questions we have asked:
Read more: Why You Shouldn't Write Low-Level OPC Code Yourself
This article describes best practices that aid in developing applications and libraries that use the QuickOPC library.
All information described in this article is merely a set of guidelines to aid development. These guidelines do not constitute an absolute truth. They are patterns that we found helpful; not rules that should be followed blindly. There are situations where certain guidelines do not apply. It is up to each individual developer to decide if a certain guideline makes sense in each specific situation.
The guidelines in this article are listed in no particular order.
Our products are listed on OPC Foundation Web site.
Our products make it into the larger Web. Many times, it is our resellers that help spreading the word. Special thanks go to Software Toolbox that brands our QuickOPC as OPCData.