uForte OPC Server Development Kit

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"uForte OPC Server Development Kit" is a fine product, it has been extremely successful in the implementations we have used it in Coating Control and Mill Control."
Ned Scopulovic, Senior Systems Engineer at Hatch IAS
 

How to start

This is a quick walk through the toolkit covering the most typical use case (the tollkit has evolved over a number of years and has a few features which are covered in Manual but not all of them are widely used).

Nowdays the Custom OPC Server (the command available in the Start program group) approach is perefered by most of the customers because it supports all the features of the tollkit and provides a full control over your OPC server process and registration.

The command opens up a Visual Studio project which is a C# source code of an OPC server based on the toolkit. It's a Windows service project which has a fair bit of code but the OPC server logic is locaed in Service1.RunServer.
This method should be modified and originally contains examples for creating OPC server address space, updating OPC DA items and AE events and conditions.

Typically you should start with defining your OPC server address space, see opcSvrMgr.AddItem in the code.
Once you have OPC DA items there (don't have to be if just an OPC AE server required) you can insert some logic to fetch OPC item values (from files/ports/etc.) and push them into the OPC server, see opcSvrMgr.UpdateItem in the code.

After this part is done (which might be left as it is) the server should be built and registered to become known to OPC clients:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe SampleOpcServerUforte.exe

Now the newly created OPC server can be browsed and accessed by OPC clients!

Browse through the C# source code to discover registration details, processing write requests from OPC clients, acknowledging AE conditions, the logic to exit the main cycle in Service1.RunServer, etc.

To update the OPC server disconnect all the OPC clients, stop the SampleOpcServerUforte service, change the source code and rebuild.

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