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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?
"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?
Hate on Microsoft if you really must, but they've done far more to improve my Linux experience lately than certain other organizations have.
Microsoft has given us VS Code, which is an excellent text editor and software development environment. It's fast and light. It's extensible. It supports many programming languages. It runs on many of the major platforms. It's a pleasure to use.
They have also given us a fantastic open source .NET implementation, which lets us reliably use fantastic languages like C# and F# on all of the major platforms. It's much better than Mono ever was.
Azure has pretty good Linux support.
Even SQL Server, which has long been an excellent RDBMS, is making its way to Linux.
So Microsoft has graciously given us a lot of great software.
Meanwhile, we have supposedly "Linux-friendly" organizations forcing shit like Unity, Wayland, systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3, and GTK+ 3 on us Linux users.
In only a few short years the Linux desktop experience was utterly ruined for us by these non-Microsoft organizations. The UIs became unusable. The audio often stopped working unexpectedly. Sometimes my Linux computers just wouldn't boot due to some obscure, and usually idiotic, way in which systemd broke. Of course, these problems are harder to diagnose due to systemd using binary logging.
I know, you'll probably accuse me of being a "paid Microsoft shill", or some nonsensical accusation like that. But do you know what? They don't have to pay me anything to post a comment like this! They've given me a lot of excellent software, much of it now open source, and for that I'm grateful. They've shown the Linux community good will, while other organizations have only ruined our once-great Linux user experience.
If anyone is doing any "embracing", "extending" and "extinguishing" these days, it isn't Microsoft. It's the most "pro-Linux" organizations that are hurting Linux's usability the most.
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...
Agreed, but it's a losing war to try and point out things in objective reality here. Not a lot of actual professional programmers around these parts.
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.
Microsoft is trying not to loose the young developers who are making mobile and web apps. VS 2015 even includes an Android emulator for mobile app development.
This is what competition is supposed to do
http://saveie6.com/
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.