Hi Mark,

EDIT: I think it is clear that the plugin is supplied as compatible with the Arduino IDE which gives us benchmarks to work too. The paid upgrade with debugger is free to try for 30 days after that time the plugin continues to function. So I think it is unfair to suggest anything more than this has been claimed or need be provided.

Currently Visual Micro is Arduino compatible for two reasons:-

1) Arduino has been in a new beta phase with their 1.5.x product. It is finally being released as 1.6.0 in a week or so.

2) Support bear in mind that most users use the free tool and I do not sell and make profit from hardware... Tell new users a way to work outside of the Arduino Ide and I get hammered with support questions from users who think it's okay to do it even if they do not really understand Arduino. They can't then ask questions on arduino.cc because it will be an unsupported way of working.

Having said this I also would like the facility but bearing in mind that when you use .ino files the compile then has to be made in a temp folder. This means the sketch sources need to be copied to the temp folder. 

I agree that if we support this a libraries folder below the sketch would be the best way to work. Then maybe we can avoid copying the lib sources to the temp folder and compile them the same way libraries are currently compiled. 

We can look at this more once arduino 1.6 is bolted down, in the meantime you can precede library #includes with the library name which might or might not help.

#include <MyLibrary1/MyLibrary.h>
#include MyLibrary1/foo.h
#include MyLibrary1/bar.h

#include <MyLibrary2/MyLibrary.h>
#include MyLibrary2/foo.h
#include MyLibrary2/bar.h

Hi,

I agree it would nice nice to have some localized sub folders. Maybe libraries confuse things and we are just saying we want a recursive compile of a certain folder off root?

To explain the other comments. They relate to the way an arduino compile is performed which is documented on arduino.cc web site. To compile, the source code from all the .ino files in a project are combined into a single .cpp file. This means a temp folder is used, therefore the sketch cpp/h code is also copied to the temp folder.

Switch on "tools>options>visual micro>compiler>show build folder" and run a compile. the temp folder the compiler uses will appear as a short cut in the output.

I think it's really important to allow devs to define their own library locations in reference to their SolutionDir or ProjectDir, and define the location within the scope of the project file (vcxproj perhaps)

I for one would like to keep my libraries in the same solution folder because then I can write my own and version-control them, and compile them on a project by project basis (I have multiple projects in my "Arduino" sln)

It would be a pretty simple feature to add in!  Right now I've got small library changes that will get lost when I push them up to my git repo 

Thanks for taking that on board.

Let's not specify git; I'll talk about source control in general, and try to explain a little clearer.

Facts (Please correct me if I'm wrong about Visual Micro):

> Users might want to write their own libraries. And version control them.

> Visual Micro can only keep it's libraries in a couple of places:
       C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Arduino\libraries
       or
       ( one custom location for the VM install? e.g. C:\Arduino\arduino-1.5.2\libraries )
       and I'm guessing, all projects compiled in Visual Micro on that machine must reference the same unique collection of libs.

> For a single project that is downloaded from source control, I must reference libraries that already exist on that computer, in one of the two places we can define.

Problem: Changing computers:
I might go to another computer and find that my source is referencing library folders that are outdated. I might not have used that computer in a while, so suitably, I would want my libraries version controlled.

Problem: (On the same machine) Loading and Compiling projects that require different versions of libraries:
I could include the required libraries in my project source, version controlled, and reference them using Visual Micro, but what happens if I choose to pull down a different project from my source control, that references all the same libraries, except different versions? Or even an older copy of the same project?

This is why each and every individual *.vcxproj project file should be allowed to reference it's own libraries through relative paths and Visual Micro needs to wire it all up on load/compile. Project references should be machine independent 

Yes having libraries that you can reference within the sketch folder would allow a 1 step process to pull down a repo and build it without worrying about the computer's library configuration.

Hi Jet,

I think your question will be best answered by arduino.cc in their forum.

Thanks