Mobiform Software, Inc.

2011-05-11T17:01:00.000-04:00

Benefits of OPC-UA

Mobiform believes that the future of process control and building management relies on OPC UA. OPC UA was developed by the OPC Foundation and many of its members to provide a way to communicate to all divisions of the organization and to share information.

In today’s market we need to get out of the mindset of not sharing information. Look at all the social networking sites, I mean I can go to Facebook and know when my brother or a friend stops at a restaurant. But that has not quite caught on in the industrial market, but it’s starting to. Companies need to share information with all divisions of their business in order to become more efficient. For example a company leaves work for the day and an employee has forgotten to turn off a machine, or an office light. That month the plant manager notices that the energy consumption for the company was considerably higher when compared to last week, for no apparent reason. Well without the sharing of data it could take months before the company realizes the problem, if they even realize it which could mean an increase in that companies’ expenses which reduce profit, as we all know. With OPC UA the plan is to share this information across all divisions of the company, so an event will be fired or a person notified if a machine or office light is left on.

Some key benefits of OPC UA include the following:

· Modeling the data

· Co-Exist with OPC classic (DA)

· Platform Independent

· Security

· Discovery

· Vendor Independence

· No DCOM

Modeling the Data-OPC UA architecture provides a foundation to build application and enterprise specific information models. This allows for vendors to design their system with the information models in mind which we allow for a quicker configuration of the applications and HMI screens. So for example OPC UA can model a Motor, and this motor would have tags or as OPC UA refers properties and these properties would have values associated with them. You could break down that even further and have a specific part on the Motor as a model and associated properties with that model. This will make for easier navigation in the tag browsing panel when binding the HMI screens.

Co-Exist with OPC Classic-OPC UA is built to be used with the other forms of OPC. So you can take your existing OPC Servers and wrap them with the OPC UA technology.

Platform Independent- the OPC UA server has been written to be platform independent. What this means to the end user is that you can now communicate to a UA server whether it is on a windows machine, Linux, or embedded on a computer chip. This allows for your HMI client to display information coming from other sources that no one else in the business has seen before. With more information companies can become more efficient, and sharing this information is the key. The plant or office manager could have no idea that equipment or a light has been left on costing the company thousands of dollars in electricity cost, not to mention increased in maintenance. But by sharing this information across the company they can address and fix the issues, resulting in a larger profit at the end of the day.

Security- OPC UA has been built with security in mind. All vendors that will support OPC UA will have this functionality. Both the OPC UA Sever and Client with validate each other through the use of certificates. The messages that the OPC UA server and the OPC UA client send can be encrypted and will only be decrypted by a validated client or server through the use of certificates.

Vendor Independence-of course vendor independence has been one of the main goals of OPC since its inception. The end user should not be locked into one specific vendor for any given task. OPC UA allows the end user the freedom to pick and choose the vendor that is right for the specific task at hand.

NO DCOM-one of the biggest benefits prior users of OPC will notice is there is no need to configure the clients for DCOM. OPC UA is DCOM free! OPC UA can communicate by standard HTTP or through a UA TCP port, or any other port that the admin has set up.

Mobiform announces the release of VantagePoint Trend for WPF and Silverlight 2.0

2009-02-27T14:19:00.010-05:00

We are proud to announce that VantagePoint Trend for WPF and VantagePoint Trend for Silverlight are now shipping!

VantagePoint Trend is a trending control that can display real-time or historical data* in an easy to read line chart. A .NET user interface control, Trend can be embedded in not only Mobiforms' products, but is also compatible with both Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend.

Trend is comprised of two parts:

TrendGraph, which is the main visual representation of the trend chart and GraphPens, which are the lines that are plotted based of the data you are subscribed to.

Trend is also exceptionally robust. Having added over 60+ GraphPens with a different data source for each updating at 50ms, Trend excelled and ran extremely stable!

GraphPens have multiple properties, which allows you to customize the Trend to almost any way you can possibly imagine.

Another great feature is that Trend for WPF and Silverlight share the same codebase, so they behave the same way regardless of whether your using it in a Windows app or a Silverlight Web app.

Check out our Trending Demo at http://www.vantagepointcontrols.com/vantagepointtrenddemo.htm to see it in action, download a trial copy of our WPF version or our Silverlight version to really see what you can do with Trend!

*When used in conjunction with generic binding in Status Vision Designer®

Mobiform announces the release of Status Vision Designer

2009-02-27T09:56:00.012-05:00

We are proud to announce that Status Vision Designer® is now shipping!

Status is a powerful data visualization software package that enables you to create some rather amazing HMI screen designs. Status not only gives you the ability to create eye catching HMI visualizations, but also allows you to take your digital signage applications to a whole new level.

One thing that makes Status so great is that it uses Microsoft Visual Studio C# and Visual Basic projects as its project file format, so there are no compatibility issues and it also allows you to easily extend your project in Visual Studio and utilize the .NET framework to its full potential.

My personal favorite is the click and drag data binding. Status makes data binding to controls unbelievably easy. Simply select your data source from the generic binding panel, pick your tag, and drag it onto the control. That's it!

Hundreds of pieces of clip art and over 70+ custom .NET 3.5 controls available for use are sure to give you the ability to completely customize your screen in any way imaginable.

To read more about Status' many features and what it can do for you, check out our website http://www.statusvision.com/ or download a trial copy of Status today to put powerful HMI design at your fingertips!

P.S. Don't forget to check out one of our webinars on Status. Its packed full of helpful tips, tricks, and other valuable information

Mobiform enters into agreement with Matrikon, Inc.

2008-11-26T14:18:00.004-05:00

From the News section of our Website:

MOBIFORM Software, Inc. announced today they have entered into an agreement with Matrikon, Inc. to utilize pieces of MOBIFORM technology in upcoming versions of Matrikon software products. To protect the strategic advantage of the technology in use and in development, the companies have chosen not to divulge further details.

Status Vision Designer - an HMI client designer

2008-11-25T15:08:00.016-05:00

As I blog this, we have some of our team at the SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2008 Exhibition and Conference, in Nuremberg, Germany.

SPS/IPC/DRIVES is the exhibition for electric automation technology. It covers all components down to the system and offers herewith integrated automation solutions.

We have been fortunate enough to have been invited to be a co-exhibitor in OPC Foundation Europe's (http://www.opcfoundation.org/) booth located in Hall 6-244. We will be demonstrating our latest product, the Status Vision Designer, which is an HMI client designer. It is now available for download as a Technology Preview. The Status Vision Designer product has already been shown to be a welcome sight to some large organizations that are actively reviewing the product. Thanks to them for all of their great feedback, involvement!

VantagePoint 2.0 Silverlight Controls on Silverlight.net

2008-11-25T14:29:00.006-05:00

Our VantagePoint 2.0 Silverlight Controls have been released (http://www.mobiform.com/).

So, we decided to create an eye-catching demonstration of them in a Silverlight application. You can view it by going to http://www.silverlight.net/. If you don't see it on the main page, then click on the Showcase link at the top of the page and type into the search field, VantagePoint 2.0 Silverlight Controls, then click the Submit button.

Mobiform Software, Inc. will be at PDC 2008!

2008-10-24T10:37:00.010-04:00

Excellent! It's time for PDC 2008, as most of you know and we are fortunate to have some of our team going to the conference. While I'm sure Microsoft will be sharing some great news, etc., we here at Mobiform Software have an exciting announcement that will be made during that same period! Make sure to check out our Website (http://www.mobiform.com/) this coming week for more information.

If you Twitter, please keep those of us that can't make it out to PDC up-to-date. And if you want to share some video of the event, that would be most welcomed.

I'm excited we are a sponsor this year for Tech Ed

2008-05-21T08:50:00.005-04:00

Well, it's just about time again (happy! happy! joy! joy!), for Tech Ed. This annual event is held down in Orlando, Florida each year and is one of the largest Microsoft sponsored events for developers and IT professionals. It's not only a great event for learning the latest technologies from Microsoft, but it's also a superb "networking" opportunity.

This year we hit a milestone as this is our first year for being a sponsor for Tech Ed!

What's really compelling about the event this time around is that Bill Gates will be the Keynote speaker. As I have never seen (er, heard) Bill speak in person, this will definitely be an experience I will remember.

Don't forget to stop by our exhibitor's booth #1115 and say hello and to try out our latest products! (Tech·Ed North America 2008 Developers Conference Agenda) (look for Partner Expo listings on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday)

We hope to see you at Tech Ed 2008!

Aurora XAML Designer (for embedding) blogged by Microsoft

2008-05-16T09:25:00.008-04:00

I'm pretty pumped today. John Pelak, a Microsoft U.S. ISV Developer Evangelist, posted on the teams blog about our Aurora XAML Designer embedding solution.

Read John's blog post

Thanks John.

Aurora for Architects - download a trial copy today

2008-05-14T14:58:00.014-04:00

Aurora for Architects, our new loose XAML file designer has gone live and folks can now start downloading the trial, as well as purchase it.

We have several How-To videos showing off the UI. I'm pretty excited about this product, as it will allow graphics designers to stop the "two-step"... where they were creating graphics, then converting to XAML before finally handing them off to development team members. Now, designers can design, get approval, and hand it off to the development team, who codes against exactly what was previously approved.

Also, I am really pleased how the theme for Aurora for Architects (or as I have come to call it, 'A4A') turned out.

We have also packed in our VantagePoint WPF Controls suite for users to take for a test drive.

Download a trial copy of Aurora for Architects today!

Back from Mix 2008

2008-03-18T17:08:00.001-04:00

We just returned from Mix 08 and have started to look at porting some WPF controls to Silverlight. Given the hype of what Silverlight 2.0 can do we thought that it would be easy, once you dig in there is a lot of stuff missing and many gotcha's.

Border class is sealed
Content property on content control is protected
Missing type converters like CornerRadius and Thickness
No Viewbox or DockPanel
No triggers in templates
No FrameworkElementFactory
Few System brushes.

The list goes on. Many I understand and would expect not to be present, but others???? Why is the Hidden property missing from the Visibility enumeration, a security risk?

Death by a thousand cuts….

XBAP Demos

2006-09-20T13:44:00.000-04:00

Paint Factory Demo
http://www.mobiform.com/demos/paintfactory/publish.htm

It's been quite busy around here for the last few months. We all are working frantically to get Aurora ready for release. With so much focus on Aurora, it's a challenge to make time to post to our blog. In the last week or two, we have seen a number of requests for our Paint Factory XBAP demo. We have updated the demo for .NET 3.0 RC1 ... just click on the link above to check it out. Our Avalon Clock XBAP demo was also updated.

Avalon Clock Demo
http://www.mobiform.com/demos/avalonclock/publish.htm

Please note that if you get a "Trust Not Granted" message, drop into the CMD Shell and type "mage -cc" to clear the application cache.

Oh, and Aurora has been updated for .NET 3.0 RC1, too. It's available for download on our Web site.

Writing a Dock Panel System in .NET 3.0

2006-07-21T17:46:00.000-04:00

So... I’ve just completed a dockable windows toolkit for our Aurora product. I thought I would share the details.

Initially, I thought it would take about 3 weeks. We had one developer take a stab at it, but it was so buggy and spaghetti-ish we did a rewrite.

The end result was pretty cool, and took about 1/3 of the code of the first attempt. We can dock panels inside panels that are floating or panels that are docked. We can add the panels such that they are children in a grid or merge the panels so that they are children in a tab control. We can dock on all four sides of our window and serialize out the last state and position of the individual panels. We have a control template written such that we can specify tabs on either top and bottom or left and right.

Overall, the .NET 3.0 API was perfect for this. It is so easy to take the content off of a tab control, for example, and apply it to a floating window. But ... it wasn’t without its difficulties. The Grid control was a complete pain. We tried a Dock Panel initially but it didn’t resize very well. The Grid resizes better, but when you collapse a panel in a cell in a Grid, the GridSplitter doesn’t handle fixed size objects very well. When we set a cell size to Auto, the Gridsplitter wouldn’t behave as desired for our requirements. This was a major hurdle that resulted in having to hook the GridSplitter delta change events and managing the size of the grid cells manually, often switching between grid cell length types that were ‘pixel’ and those that were ‘star’. The other problem we hit was getting the mouse position - it was often invalid or inaccurate if we were in the middle of a MouseCapture or Window.DragMove.

The end result is pretty neat. Check it out in the latest build of the Aurora XAML Designer on our Web site ...

Aurora Beta 9.3 for June CTP of .NET 3.0 Available

2006-07-05T11:57:00.000-04:00

Our latest Beta of Aurora (9.3) is now available for the latest .NET 3.0 CTP (June). Click on the link to our company Web site on the right, which has links to both updates.

This is an engineering build with some new additions:

Simple Styles and Control Templates can now be visually created and modified - plus, there is support for triggers. This is new functionality and not fully cooked, but you can poke at it.
Opens Visual Studio 2005 project files, and allows for adding and editing of individual XAML documents
Cool magnifying glass inspector tool
'Object Search' function for locating visual objects in your display

Be warned ... we had some issues upgrading to the .NET 3.0 June CTP. You might want to follow the following steps if you have a previous installation of .NET Framework 3.0 (a.k.a. WinFX Runtime Components 3.0) Beta 2. If you have WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) functionality, you will need to manually update Windows Imaging Components (WIC) in order for WPF to function correctly.

1. Uninstall the current version or previous version of .NET Framework 3.0 (WinFX 3.0)
2. Uninstall previous WIC installation

1. Go to Start
2. Run...
3. Type in "%windir%\$NtUninstallWIC$\spuninst\spuninst.exe". Install .NET Framework 3.0 June CTP
4. Install WIC from: x86: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=69301&clcid=0x409x64: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=69302&clcid=0x409

Welcome!

2006-06-29T14:56:00.000-04:00

Well, it's about time we had a blog, isn't it?