Thought I’d share with any one who has used Visual Studio (and ergo, won’t be able to settle for anything else :p)
The sophistication of such IDEs is a two-edged sword: reminds me of the arguments between using high-end calculators or pencil&paper/sliderules for student testing. These days, there is an overwhelming belief in electronic calculators always being available, therefore testing has evolved to allow these high-end electric sliderules.
Now, if all those students could just be ensured that an EMP will not ruin their lives by frying everything electronic…
Ray
PS: While I encourage those in the forum to explore software tools, please remember that just because it was posted here and given a glowing review – ONLY the Arduino IDE is officially supported in the forum. So, use what IDE you want, but when it comes to asking questions of the forum, please transfer your code to Arduino first (or write a code-snippet in Arduino to demonstrate any issue you need solved.)
Good point. I should point out that Visual Micro acts as middleman for Visual Studio, because under the hood it’s calling Arduino IDE toolchain and libraries, just with a nicer UI.
And hence the issues that many IDE’s and addins have … the “calling”. Creating exactly the same environment with the same switches is often a bit more difficult than it would appear to be on the surface. From time to time I read about the other GUIs making incorrect assumptions, etc. It can be a real timewaster.
Ray
Same here although it is easy enough to tick the box in preferences and use an external editor while still using the IDE for compilation and upload. I find that VSCode is a bit easier on my eyes for long coding sessions. It also lets you open a folder if you have a multi-tab project.
[mrburnette – Fri Sep 14, 2018 2:58 pm] –
Not that anyone cares what I think, but for the record:
You’ll find that many people care what more knowledgeable people say. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t reply angrily 
Although I disagree with many of your points, I support your conclusion 100%:
For the sophisticated (and self-supported), use what you want.
For newbies, forget the fancy and problematic IDEs and just learn to write good code. The time wasted with installing and configuring an advanced IDE is better spent learning the basics of C/C++. A fancy IDE will not make one a better programmer.
I must say, I take special issue with this point.
[mrburnette – Fri Sep 14, 2018 2:46 pm] –
I certainly would not hire a programmer that required such a crutch. (…) Pencil and paper were given to prospective job seekers to demonstrate their ability to write code snippets.
I wouldn’t call basic IDE features in 2018 crutches. I walked out of my last job interview (Software Development, not embedded and not web) because the interviewer asked me to write a for loop, after spending 30 minutes discussing highly technical and specific programming questions answered. I felt offended, frankly. No other industry does this to its senior members and I reject it out of principle. This also includes technical tests (I have a large degree, for that) and sample projects (also known as free work from potential employees).
Of course, my perspective is coloured completely differently, from the software industry I work in, from all the new anti-employee scams that are common now the you Ray probably never had to deal with.
You think cubicles were bad? Try to focus on an open space with 300 people. You think being reliant on basic IDE features is a crutch? Most programmers nowadays refuse to work if there’s no internet. Completely different environment.
[MoDu – Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:29 pm] –
…
Of course, my perspective is coloured completely differently, from the software industry I work in, from all the new anti-employee scams that are common now the you Ray probably never had to deal with.
You think cubicles were bad? Try to focus on an open space with 300 people. You think being reliant on basic IDE features is a crutch? Most programmers nowadays refuse to work if there’s no internet. Completely different environment.
I respect your input.
Here in Georgia we have the “HOPE Scholarship” funded by the State Lottery. I have interviewed BS graduates with high GPAs that cannot think logically and cannot write a C loop. I wish some of them had walked-out of my interviews and saved me the pain of dealing with their bloated egos.
I come from a military communications and high-security environment. In many careers, Internet access (freely) is evil. I appreciate that some professional programmers have come to believe they need full-access to the “web” but the most I would concede is via proxy for pre-selected sites.
Environments do evolve, but there are some non-social media jobs in the real world that have firm rules that have only marginally evolved in the last 30 years… Jobs that the general public are unaware that exist. Many of us that know about them wish we did not.
Ray
I have interviewed BS graduates with high GPAs that cannot think logically and cannot write a C loop.
Yes, this is so common now that most software companies have stopped hiring directly and just rely on consulting firms to filter 500 candidates down to 5 who might actually know how to program properly. And then you find out they have zero social skill and can’t work in a team.
I wish some of them had walked-out of my interviews and saved me the pain of dealing with their bloated egos.
I would say it would be even better if you threw them out, then they might learn something 
Jobs that the general public are unaware that exist.
Oh please, do tell more. Because I can tell you some horror stories about banks relying on underpaid workers to migrate live databases with customer transactions ($$$), all while unwinding 30 year Fortran legacy code.
[MoDu – Mon Sep 17, 2018 3:48 pm] –
…
Oh please, do tell more. Because I can tell you some horror stories about banks relying on underpaid workers to migrate live databases with customer transactions ($$$), all while unwinding 30 year Fortran legacy code.
Best we stop here as we are 180° off-topic.
But I worked as the IT Manager in the Research Dept. of the Federal Reserve. I know the stories personally. I also packed my coffee cup one morning and quit. IMHO, the Air Force was more sane.
I coordinated Y2K for an RBOC … some Fortran, but mostly Cobol.
Regards,
Ray
Just this last week I wanted to install some updated PCB layout software on my win XP machine. I have two machines, in different locations. In theory they should be identical. On One I attempted to install the Newer version Atmel IDE which is .Net based. I also have installed various instances of the STM tools to extract stuff from the installed folders. For some reason the .Net on that machine is corrupted and even a fix re-install the program still crashes when a lib can not be found. The other machine Which was not clobbered with so many versions of Visual Studio and .Net and developer SDKs, the program installed and ran just fine.
I love it when the horse get so beaten, that there is only a faint grease spot by the side of the road.
Interesting I also was given a board to fix. I called the really helpful designer (who is now in his Mid to late 80s) He was sounding a bit forgetful. He said the board only cost 100 bucks to make. That he forgot how the UDP IP addresses were created. Since he had not looked at the code for years. When I talked with him a few years back he was getting the program to run on Raspberry pi. Now he has no interest in that. His justification.
Most of his customers are older and can go to Wallmart an buy a windows machine for a few hundred buck. He says if you go to Wallmart to by a “Linux” machine, they have no idea what one is wanting. The other issue is that There are too many flavors of Linux which the customers do not have time to deal with. So they spend all their time calling him, with questions relating to how to turn the computer on and load in the program.
There is much more, I could go on with, but the whip I was beating the horse with is shredded into a small nub …
still linux based ‘PCs’ are somewhat ‘rare’ even today.
But then something changed in recent years, since the RPi and Beagleboard (e.g. beaglebone black) upswing it is Linux basically, and it seemed to have mushroomed into a rather recent SBC (single board computers) market where in new players like Asus Tinkerboard, various offering from Olimex, Orange pi, Nano Pi etc and others running on socs such as the Allwinner socs, Rockchip socs etc start to join the fray and yes Linux is it.
the ground is rumbling, it has been that way always and things seemed to be changing (just as stm32duino evolves as part of the change)
i doubt SBC is going to replace (windows) desktop any time soon, people are used to be seeing that ‘desktop runs windows’ and they don’t want change
i think android and chrome (os) are also vying for a place on the desktop but remains rather niche as of now
on linux, it is normally eclipse as an alternative ide, but i think there are many choices in addition to the arduino ide itself today
but of course microsoft isn’t sitting still
https://www.windowscentral.com/windows- … -it-or-not
i think https://www.visualmicro.com which uses visual studio (community) is a good idea and i’d normally consider it if i’m working on windows.
similar to eclipse etc, the main thing is that most developers wants to program the duinos but also wants to have all the bells and whistles, code completion, jumping to codes references, syntax highlighting etc thrown in
[ag123 – Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:01 pm] –
…
still linux based ‘PCs’ are somewhat ‘rare’ even today.
…
An interesting (to me) event is going on at Raspberry… they created a lean Raspberry flavor desktop OS using Debian Stretch, I write about it here.
In my most recent Arduino STM32 + Arduino + RPI3B + Google AIY project , I used an old HP 110 netbook running Raspbian OS and Arduino IDE and completed the project without assistance from my i7 or i5 Intel notebooks. The Raspbian experience was not bad for an “Intel Atom dualcore” PC that is 10 years old.
Julie, I’m surely sorry about the automobile break in… terrible experience.
Ray
i still have an ‘old’ eeePC 701
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC
the main thing about linux is that for the occasional web browsing which is about as ‘heavy lifting’ as it gets on a x11-desktop, linux is game for that.
a lot of other things are done on the command line which is relatively ‘light weight’ on the cpu etc
i’ve deserted that for a good long time since i got a much higher end ultrabook which i runs linux on where windows lives in its separate partition
but if i power up the eeePC 701 it would still work justs as it originally was, my gripe about the EeePC isn’t too much about the lack of power but that the keys are spaced so closely i’d type a wrong key pretty often. the eeePC 701 is also a pretty high battery consumer for what is not a very fast cpu compared to today’s ultrabooks and has only 4g storage built-in
