I have worked on a number of projects in Wonderware and iFIX and while they have there advantages, I am seriously considering using Visual Studio/.NET/c# for a new application. If I use visual studio I get a professional development enviroment (including source code control, professional designers, etc) and a very flexible framework to start with. Of course there are a few things missing, like a built in tag list, alarm monitoring etc. At this point, I am just looking at opinions for and/or against this approach.

Thanks.

 

As an engineer, developing a product is challenging and exciting, however, writing code is only part of developing software. A few other items for consideration...
Requirements need to de clearly defined.
Is there time for testing and quality assurance?
Who will provide maintenance and bug fixes?
How long will you support the software?
Will documentation be needed for users? programmers?
Will there be an SDK or other interface for customization?
What happens on a new OS release?
How many communications drivers are needed?
What happens if a truck flattens you? Are your colleagues willing and able to pick up the slack?

As an integrator/user, I want a product that is easy to learn, easy to configure, easy to deploy, already has a programming interface, and has adequate support. No time to develop and test your own software programs.

 

Most of the features you would need from a HMI would already be there in the off the shelf software - trending, graphic toolkit, alarming, redundant IO server, etc.
If you build everything yourself by VS or VB how much man-hour cost are you considering investing and how many of similar systems are you selling? Ultimately it is a cost based decision.

if you want to use VB based HMI you can try some of the tools
http://www.opcware.com/OPCWare.html
http://www.developersdex.com/gurus/code/

[email protected]

 

I do this all the time. I do not need all of the
standard features of a typical MMI or SCADA package.
I create my own subset. If you need most of the
features of a SCADA package, you may as well buy the
SCADA package. You will spend a fair amount of time
writing and testing alarming, tags, historians... Of
course, if this is what you like to do, go for it.

I use C# with an embedded database called CodeBase. I
highly recommend using a database product to organize
your data. This approach gives me data integrity,
fast queries, and client/server capability. I then
write my own classes to contain my unique algorithms.
Then call these classes from a somewhat generic main
routine.

I also recommend purchasing ActiveX, .NET, or maybe
OPC drivers. This will relieve you from this time
consuming task.

Hope this helps,

Bill

 

Thanks for all of your responses. I agree it would be a lot of work to create our own tag system, alarm reporting, and historian, etc so I will likely use Wonderware or iFix. It is unfortunate that these types of services can't be included in visual studio with an add-in or something. Does anyone know of such a thing?

 

What is the difference between Visual Studio Standard and Professional if we mean hardware (USB, Modbus ...) control applications only?

Is it worth to buy professional version?

Waldemar

 

I've always used the standard version for automation projects.  None of the professional features seem to apply to me.

Bill

 

By using an OPC toolkit along with the OPC Servers you needed for your devices, you could handle the tag part with a minimum of code/headaches.

Depends entirely on what you want to do though.

Adriel Michaud
MatrikonOPC

 

As I guess, to work with OPC server only professional version of VS can be used? And which version is most useful for such application: VS6, VS.net, 2005 or...? I heard they are not 100% backward compatible.

 

We have thousands of customers, some of then very large, Fortune 500 companies, that use VS developed products in their processes. In fact, most of the manufacturers of OPC products are probably developing in Visual Studio.

Now, I will make a shameless plug. Check out Kepware's ClientAce. It is a .net development toolkit. It features a drag and drop tool that allows you to connect to a server and link data from the server directly to objects on your form. [http://www.kepware.com/Products/OPC_ClientAce.html]

You will also find a very nice toolbox of automation objects from Software Toolbox. I use the Ingear .net product all the time for demos. [http://www.softwaretoolbox.com/Prod_Services/DotNet/dotnet.asp]

Fred Loveless
Senior Application Engineer
Kepware Technologies
http://www.kepware.com

 

Keep in mind there are connectivity solutions available other than OPC that may be applicable to your application.

OPC is very useful for data sharing across multiple OPC Clients but for single machine HMI applications built using Visual Studio, may be overkill.

Automated Solutions offers OPC Servers, but also offers .NET components and ActiveX Controls that provide high performance and allow you to create a fully managed, monolithic application with no OPC overhead or learning curve.

Additionally, if your application qualifies (see license agreement), Automated Solutions' .NET Components and ActiveX Controls are runtime-free.

Mark
http://www.automatedsolutions.com