At Day 0 of AVEVA World in San Francisco I found out that the AF SDK is finally being updated to a .Net Core version, meaning support for later versions of .NET (ie, .NET 6, .NET 7, and .NET 8). No timeline as yet for the release, but it will be "soon

Very interesting. This topic means a lot to a lot of developers, many who have drifted away from PI Square.

I have similar topic in: https://pisquare.osisoft.com/s/question/0D58W00007BtN0ASAV/microsoft-releases-wcf-for-net-core-5-6-does-af-sdk-now-have-a-path-foward-to-net-core

They used WCF as the main roadblock, but it sounds like they decided to not just port to .NET with CoreWCF, but to modify some fairly major plumbing with gRPC.

Indeed. It was interesting as I was speaking with Ronan and Brian about this, they indicated the biggest issue was actually MDA (which I assume is Model Driven Architecture, but I was too stunned about the comment concerning updating the AF SDK to actually clarify the acronym). In any event, this is good news, and I think the move to gRPC is a good one.

Hey John, around 2011-ish, MDA stood for Managed Data Access. It was used to get all the heavy Component Object Model data from the PI Data Archive and instead use .NET managed objects or simple types like Double, Int32, etc. Something like a PITime object would have its payload extracted and put inside a simple DateTime object. It made life wonderful since the AF SDK developer did not need to deal with the messiness of Component Object Model.

Hey John, around 2011-ish, MDA stood for Managed Data Access. It was used to get all the heavy Component Object Model data from the PI Data Archive and instead use .NET managed objects or simple types like Double, Int32, etc. Something like a PITime object would have its payload extracted and put inside a simple DateTime object. It made life wonderful since the AF SDK developer did not need to deal with the messiness of Component Object Model.