OK... Once again, I'm going to try and tackle this upgrade to .net. My question for ANY of y'all is "Have you ever been able to use .net to talk to a PLC?" It doesn't matter if it's VB.net, C#.net, C++.net, or any of the supported langages.

I know how easy it is to do this in classic VB6, so it might be asked... "Why would you want to?" Well, in truth, I'm tired of having both programming suites on my computer. Since I now use .net 2005 for everything other than PLC, I'd like to drop the older software.

If anyone HAS done this, can you post a sample? Just a simple grab the time or something would work fine.

I would recommend checking out InGear

http://www.ingeardrivers.com/


TRW

That's cool, and there are many controls out there that will let you do that. HOWEVER, I'm looking to do the same thing without having to fork over a ton of money to an outside source.

Just like there are a million active X objects for classic vb to read PLCs, there are the same for visual studio.net. However, once you get down to it, it's VERY easy to communicate with the PLC in classic VB, so there really isn't a point spending the cash on a control for it (unless your company is just loaded with money it wants to shell out, or you don't don't have much of a programming background...)

What I'm looking for is, how to get started creating my own .net components that can be shared (for FREE) with the PLC guys that have to use this crud on a day to day level.

(Having just re-read what I wrote, I don't mean to say that store bought components are a bad thing... There is a time when it's more cost effective to buy them instead of paying for my time to re-invent the wheel, but I'm more intrested in the times that I'm just working on the side or just building a small personal project.)