Visual Studio Extension

The Visual Studio Extension provides integration of QuickOPC or OPC Wizard with Visual Studio (on Windows). It is possible to use QuickOPC or OPC Wizard without the Visual Studio Extension, but not all development-time functionality will be available to you without it.

The Visual Studio Extension is only available when you install Connectivity Software using the Installation with the Setup Program. In addition, you need to install it from an icon in the Launcher application. The Visual Studio Extension is not available if you just reference the NuGet Packages or COM Components in your project.

Following are the features provided by the Visual Studio Extension:

Toolbox items. They can be dragged to the design surface in library, Windows Forms and WPF projects, and provide components for the OPC communications, and Live Binding Model and user interface components.
Type editors for various objects.
Designers for various types of values and QuickOPC components.
Code analyzers. They provide additional analysis specifically aimed at the proper usage of QuickOPC and OPC Wizard APIs, and OPC in general. Affected places are marked up with "squiggles" directly in the code, and also appear as warnings (or other message severities) in the Error List window.

The Connectivity Software extension for Visual Studio requires at least Visual Studio 17.6.3. Without Visual Studio extension, you can still most QuickOPC and OPC Wizard features. In general, code development and building is possible with older Visual Studio versions. The Visual Studio extension is only needed for non-essential advanced features such as Live Binding (design-time) in QuickOPC, creating code for instantiating components by dragging them from the Toolbox, editing component properties in the VS designer, code analyzers etc. The Visual Studio Extension is not installed by default - use an icon from the Launcher application to install it.

In runtime, all user interface features (such as controls, dialogs, and live binding; Windows Forms and WPF) and non-visual components are supported both under .NET Framework and .NET 8+. However, "designing" them (this includes tasks like dragging from the Toolbox, or configuring in Properties window) in Visual Studio is only possible in .NET Framework projects. In order to achieve visual design for .NET 8+ projects, the developer can make two project files over the same set of source files, one targeting .NET Framework and one targeting .NET 8+, and use the project that targets .NET Framework for visual design tasks.

Troubleshooting

Common

QuickOPC