Links

Beckhoff TwinCAT

AllTwinCAT

If you have always wondered whether unit tests are possible with TwinCAT or would like to know how a build pipeline can be realized, you will find a plethora of ideas on Jakob Sagatowski’s blog. Besides the unit test framework TcUnit he developed, he describes how a build pipeline for TwinCAT can be realized using Jenkins, the static code analysis TE1200 and the Automation Interface.
Highly recommended!

Stefan Henneken

Design patterns have proven to be very useful tools in software development. On one hand because they provide well-tried solutions for frequently occurring problems, and on the other hand, they simplify talking about the code. According to Uncle Bob, developers spend 90% of their time reading code and only 10% writing it. That should be reason enough to write it as understandable as possible. Design patterns have become jargon and Stefan Henneken makes a great contribution by making them accessible to TwinCAT programmers.

He has also taken up the cause of spreading object orientation, which has been possible since 2006 in IEC 61131-3.

PLCCoder.com

Gerhard Barteling also deals with object orientation on his blog. Besides the three pillars of OOP he presents tips&tricks of programming with TwinCAT.

Armando Rene Narvaez Contreras’ Thesis

In this thesis further design patterns are investigated and implemented with ST. Among others the Builder, Observer, Decorator and Singleton pattern. The thesis is well structured and quite informative.

.NET und SPS

Mesta Automation

This blog is primarily about communication between .NET applications and PLCs (Siemens, Allen Bradley). There are numerous tips on how to develop appealing HMIs using C#, WPF and available libraries.

Software development

MartinFowler.com

If you are into software development, sooner or later you will come across Martin Fowler and wonder how you could have overlooked him for so long. In addition to his excellent book on refactoring, he writes about current topics in software development on his website, a mixture of blog and wiki. He mainly deals with Dependency Injection, Refactoring, Agile and Software Architectures. In short, with everything that makes software good software.

Besides his books and these articles, I do reccommend listening to some of his Talks.

Refactoring Guru

Between the many books and blogs that exist on the subject of design patterns, this website has given me the simplest explanation of the individual patterns. I do recommend it to a beginners, not least because of the lovely illustrations.