I used to program VB 6 and am now just started getting back into things with .net. I have been doing Rockwell PLCs and HMI for the past 25 years and thought I would check out Advance HMI to see what it was all about. I am used to providing customers with anything Factory Talk View (PanelView, ME, SE Local, SE Network, etc). Looking into Advance HMI all started when I wanted to create an application to replace an Excel VBA tool I made. All that it does is open up an Excel file, grab thousands of points per excel column and download these to ControlLogix tag arrays as well as upload any tag array. I used this tool to create profiles in Excel and dump the data to the PLC for profile playback.
To make a short story long, Advanced HMI solved this problem for me. I found the VB.net fun and I purchased the Ethernet driver from AdvancedHMI. It is reasonably priced and makes communicating to ControlLogix painless, I highly recommend. I wanted to learn how to create custom controls and I ended up making an indicator control that I could to add to my projects. It has about 15 combinations of colors and types but it was a good first control to learn how to do it. I attached the .dll file and installation instructions to this post if anyone wants it.
