Internal version number: 5.83

Key changes:

• New product: Rapid Toolkit for Sparkplug
• Miscellaneous improvements

Sparkplug is a trademark of Eclipse Foundation, Inc. "MQTT" is a trademark of the OASIS Open standards consortium. Other related terms are trademarks of their respective owners. Any use of these terms on this site is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply any sponsorship, endorsement or affiliation.

Nomenclature

• Changed the name of the product suite from "OPC Studio" to simply "Connectivity Software", sometimes also externally referred to as "Connectivity Products".

Fundamentals

• Introduced a new product in the Connectivity Software product family: Rapid Toolkit for Sparkplug - a toolkit for development of Sparkplug host applications and edge nodes.

Targeting

• Windows 11 version 25H2 (x64) added to the list of supported operating systems.

Technology

• OPC UA Client-Server parts are now based on OPC Foundation UA-.NETStandard 1.5.376.213.
• The OpcLabs.MqttNet communication package has been upgraded from MQTTnet and MQTTnet.Extensions.ManagedClient version 4.3.3.952 to 4.3.7.1207.

Packaging

• Separated low-level OpcLabs.Core and OpcLabs.Core.Forms NuGet packages for reuse. This change is largely invisible to the developer; you keep referencing the same high-level NuGet packages as before, and the new packages get automatically referenced transitively.

Installation and Uninstallation

• Reorganized the installation components to reflect the choice of products, workloads, development platforms, and features more logically (this change only affects the installation experience if the user chooses the custom installation option).
• The items in Launcher (and Start menu) are now grouped by the product at the first level. All icons related to a product are organized beneath that product. Icons shared by multiple products appear under each such product.

Component Improvements

OPC UA PubSub

• The custom connection property "0:MqttTopicPrefix" is interpreted as the <Prefix> part of the topic convention.
• More relaxed decoding of JSON messages, allowing to process messages from publishers not fully conforming with the OPC UA specification.

User Interface

• In the certificate information property grids, such as the on the Application Certificates tab of the Administer OPC UA Application dialog, new rows are included that show the Key Usages and Enhanced Key Usages specified in the certificate.

OPC Wizard

• OPC Wizard now supports OPC UA server development in PowerShell.

Component Refactorings

OPC UA Administration and PKI

• Certificate types that correspond to ECC Brainpool curves are treated as unsupported when the program is running under .NET Framework 4.7.2. It appears that .NET Framework 4.8 is the minimum version that supports the ECC Brainpool curves.

OPC Wizard

• Server endpoint addresses are no longer generated for IPv4 APIPA and IPv6 link-local addresses.

Development Productivity

Visual Studio Integration

• The Visual Studio extension is now not installed by default. For workloads that require it (Live Binding, or placing components from Visual Toolbox), the user need to either select it specifically during the custom installation, or manually install it afterwards.
• Added icons to the Launcher (Start menu) to easily install and uninstall the Visual Studio extension.

Examples

Platform: .NET

• Added set of OPC Wizard examples in PowerShell.

Documentation and Help

• Organized the User's Guide more logically, placing the product at the first hierarchy level in the Contents.