Slashdot Mirror


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?

1 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't MS that's doing the "extinguishing" lately by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.