Powerful Design-time User Interface What makes the Software Toolbox Extender's flexible and easy to use is in the User Interface. All that is required is the Extender component, an Engine , and your Visual Studio form. Link a WinForm component to a PLC memory address or OPC Engine, and you're done. How easy is it? Let's take a look: 1 Drop a Software Toolbox Extender component onto the form. The Extender is the user-interface component that extends the properties of any component you use. 2 Next, we need to drop an Engine onto the form. An Engine performs the actual communications with the device or OPC server. We'll use our OPC Engine for this. 3 We next need to configure the Extender to point to the the Engine. We change the "DataCollectionEngine" property of the Extender to point to the Engine we dropped onto the form in the previous step. 4 Next, as this is an OPC Engine, we need to configure the Engine to point to a specific OPC Server. Simply clicking on the Browse button of the OPC Connection gives you a listing of OPC Servers on the local computer. Should you want to look at OPC Servers on other computers, you can do that by changing the "Computer" property of the Engine (not shown on screen to the right) before selecting your OPC Server. 5 Then, a WinForm object is placed on the form. We'll use a Label for this example. 6 When you place a WinForm object on the form, you will notice that it will gain a new property. This property is the SWToolboxExtender property. Click on the Browse icon to the right of the property name, and you can start the process of assigning the properties of this Label to tags in your OPC Server. 7 Next, we'll assign the properties. We click "Add" to add an extension, select the property of the control from the "NameOfProperty" property, select our OPC Tag from the "ItemID" property (through a pull down box that shows all the tags available), set the Scan Rate, and click OK. You can add as many extensions to as many properties as you like (assuming the property can be supported. For example, changing the "Name" property is not supported). For a full-size picture of this dialog box, see below. 8 Save, compile and run.   And there you have it. Simple. Quick. The Software Toolbox Extender. Full size Picture of the Collections dialog box in Step #7: