Visual Studio Extension

The Visual Studio Extension provides integration of OPC Data Client with Visual Studio (on Windows). It is possible to use OPC Data Client 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 OPC Data Client using the Setup Program. It 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 OPC Data Client components.
Code analyzers. They provide additional analysis specifically aimed at the proper usage of OPC Data Client 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 OPC Data Client Visual Studio extension requires at least Visual Studio 17.6.3. Without Visual Studio extension, you can still most of OPC Data Client 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), creating code for instantiating components by dragging them from the Toolbox, editing component properties in the VS designer, code analyzers etc.

In runtime, all user interface features (such as controls, dialogs, and live binding; Windows Forms and WPF) and nonvisual components are supported both under .NET Framework and .NET 6+. 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 6+ projects, the developer can make two project files over the same set of source files, one targeting .NET Framework and one targeting .NET 6+, and use the project that targets .NET Framework for visual design tasks.