Live Binding in the Designer

The beauty of the live binding is that it can be set up without any manual coding. This means that there has to be a tight integration with the development environment (IDE), i.e. Visual Studio.

This chapter describes the various places where the live binding in integrated with the Visual Studio and its designer features.

While the main principles of the Live Binding remain the same regardless of the application, some of its aspects differ in design time. The differences between designing in Windows Forms and WPF are described in the subsequent chapters, where applicable.

WPF design-time features are not available in OPC Data Client version 2024.2. This affects the ability to use Visual Studio to configure Live Binding in WPF applications, and to configure properties of OPC Data Client WPF controls.

You can still use XAML editing to configure properties of OPC Data Client WPF controls. OPC Data Client version 2024.2 still fully supports WPF in run-time, i.e. the functionality of OPC Data Client WPF controls in run-time is not affected, and also existing applications that use WPF Live Binding run correctly.

We are evaluating the feasibility of supporting the WPF design-time features in a future version.

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 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.