I have been a keen arduino hobbyist for some years, but I have not enjoyed using the arduino/processing IDE. My preference is to use Visual Studio to create Arduino projects. This is why I have created the Visual Micro product, an Arduino AddIn for Visual Studio.
You will find information that explains how to use the product on this site. Use the search bar or "tags" list to find what you are looking for. The forum is a place for ideas, suggestions or general comments and feed back. Initially I thought it right to charge for commercial use of the product but I have now decided that it should be free and also become open source. The reason for this is that, sites such as DIY Drones and Liquidware make great products but I have also benefited from their code examples. This is my opportunity to give to the community!
I have said that I developed this product because I want to use Visual Studio to create and maintain arduino projects. I am not the best developer to do this job and I also do not have much spare time. If anyone else would like to help develop or re-develop this product then I will be happy to supply all the information that I have and provide as much advice as I can give. Email me if you are interested, I will provide proven contributors with access to edit and update this site.
Setup and usage guides are included on this site so please use the search facility or the page list to find the arcticles that you are looking for.
The arduino addin can be obtained from the downloads area. Please see the archive for help and instructions, the ReadMe and the Getting Started Guide are the most important documents
** Visual Micro - Build 1.8 full build 6th May 2010. (2005/2008 only!) **
The recent multi sketch work and VS 2010 additions caused compile/upload bugs in vs 2005 and 2008. Please use v1.8 for 2005 and 2008.
A new release for 2010 will be available shortly, from now on there will be two seperate versions. One for 2005/2008 and one for 2010. The version number of 2010 renditions will be 2.x.
Version 1.6 also includes support for visual studio 2010
snippet... Navigating the Navigator
Editing any of the ardupilot versions using visual studio 2010 really shows off the quality of the ardupilot code. I love people who comment their code. Very neat!
And look how easy arduino project "navigation" is in Visual Studio, you can "Go To" the right place in the code.
I didn't know where the stabilize() function was but visual studio "Go To Definition" took me right to the attitude.pde. The intellisense in visual studio works best with well stuctured programs such as ArduPilot!
You need Visual Micro to make this work easily in 2010. It is free and quite new so the help system is a little confusing. Feel free to grab a copy.
The ardupilot code can't yet be compiled in visual studio due to the complex interaction between the multiple .pde files. However, Visual Micro adds a menu item to visual studio called "Open project in Arduino".which allows you to easily jump into the Arduino IDE to compile your mods. The next release of Visual Micro will allow compile and upload from within visual studio
Version 1.2 includes support for multi sketch arduino projects
Large Arduino projects benefit from the visual studio intellisense. The ArduPilot project is a good example!
Everything you see below was automatically created when I opened the ArduPilot_25.pde in Visual Studio. The _core folder includes mappings to the Arduino board files, all other sketch files including .c and .h were also automatically linked into a new solution.
I opened the ArduPilot sketch, dropped down the master intellisense list (CTRL+J) and was amazed to see how much hard work has been invested into the ArduPilot system
It isn't yet possible to compile multi sketch projects. However, the Tools menu provides a quick way to open the project in the Arduino IDE. This means you can work in Visual Studio and it is only two clicks to compile in Arduino
Current Release - Version 1.8 (Visual Studio 2005/2008)
Current Release - Version 1.6/1.7 (Visual Studio 2010)