Microsoft Makes 'Visual Studio Code Extension for Arduino' Open Source (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli quotes BetaNews: Thursday, Microsoft released yet another open source tool on GitHub -- Visual Studio Code Extension for Arduino. This MIT-licensed code should greatly help developers that are leveraging Arduino hardware for Internet of Things-related projects and more. "Our team at Visual Studio IoT Tooling, researched the development tools developers are using today, interviewed many developers to learn about their pain points developing IoT applications, and found that of all layers of IoT, there are abundant dev tools for cloud, gateway, interactive devices, and industrial devices, but limited availability and capability for micro-controllers and sensors...

"Keeping open source and open platform in mind, we started the work to add an extension on Visual Studio Code, the cross-platform, open sourced advanced code editor, for Arduino application development," says Zhidi Shang, R&D and Product Development, Microsoft.
Microsoft's adds that its tool "is almost fully compatible and consistent with the official Arduino IDE," extending its capabilities with "the most sought-after features, such as IntelliSense, Auto code completion, and on-device debugging for supported boards."

Maybe this would be a good time to ask if anybody has a favorite IDE that they'd like to recommend?

Comments

Re:EEE

[Slugster]

But how? And why?
The Arduino line of products is open-source, and (I'd bet that) most sold are clones that don't return any money to the originating company.
Arduinos aren't even that good of an example of embedded chips; most toys use smaller items more like the ATTiny85, and most industrial-grade stuff runs bigger+faster ARM chips...
,,, How many tens of millions would MS have to spend to gain control of the multi-million-dollar Arduino empire?

As for what VS Code actually does,,, it's a bit nicer but I'm not seeing differences big enough to try to change to it.
The debugging is still only on ARM chips that physically support it, which is (not most Arduinos). And most Arduino coders live without on-chip debugging just fine... ?

Maybe they are playing a educational/school game here...

Re:Isn't MS that's doing the "extinguishing" latel

[serviscope_minor]

Outside of Slashdot most professional programmers use Visual Studio and Windows with a smaller section still using Eclipse somewhere in a tiny section of the office on older macs.

Depends on the area, but I'd hazard a guess that these days they mostly don't. App development is pretty big so I hear these days which means Xcode or whatever the fuck google is touting this month (though you can hack it with Make if you try hard enough I hear). Embedded dev is done with GCC, LLVM, IAR, Green Hills, Keil and if you're really unlucky, a proprietary venduh one. Heck some of them even use Simulink.

Webdev, which I hear is also a thing, you can use VS for the C# ones, but that's not exactly dominant and has a small share of the pie compared to non MS tech. There are armies of peoplecoding up wordpress stuff in whatever editor, but likely not visual studio.

Oh and there's oodles of dull-as-fuck corporate java business logic back end stuff. I don't think VS is any great shakes for that.

Anyway, yeah there's plenty, but I'd dispute "most" unless you have some decent stats to back it up.

Re:Isn't MS that's doing the "extinguishing" latel

[Darinbob]

Visual studio has severe flaws, and is not portable outside of Windows in any convenient fashion. Most embedded systems that are off the shelf come with their own eclipse based IDE (not that eclipse is any good mind you, but it's very commonly used). Both VS and Eclipse require not-quite-there-yet plugins for any embedded development work.