Hi, I just started using Visual Micro today and noticed that when I create a new project that has a dot in its name, Visual Micro fails to correctly initialize it (no error messages, though) and leaves me with a broken project.

This is what I have in the solution explorer. Strangely, though, the "My_Project.ino" file doesn't actually exist in the "My.Project" directory.


Also, the vMicro menu seems to be incomplete:



All of this, however, doesn't happen if I add the dots later both in the Visual Studio project name (by renaming it in VS) and in the project's directory and files (by renaming them manually and changing the project and file references in the .sln and .vcxproj files). The renamed project is built correctly.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'm sorry, but unfortunately you got everything wrong.

Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Jan 19^th, 2018 at 12:35pm:

You most certainly can create sketches with dots through the Arduino IDE; I just did, and it compiled correctly too.
If that's not what you meant, you should be more specific.


Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Jan 19^th, 2018 at 12:35pm:

I didn't use "File>New>Arduino Project" to create the project; I used "File>New>Project>Visual C++>Arduino Project" and the resulting behaviour is what I described in my original post.

Do you mind taking an actual look at it and try to reproduce the issue?


Anyway, I found out that using a plain C++ project and custom build events suits my needs more than Visual Micro. I just wanted to let you know of this issue, though, since it doesn't seem to be caused by neither Arduino nor VS.

Hi.

Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Jan 19^th, 2018 at 5:09pm:

Slightly incorrect. I never mentioned spaces; I didn't even try to create a project with spaces with Visual Micro, though. I'm just talking about dots (or periods, points, full stops, decimal ASCII code 46). So yeah, you can not have more than "one file extension" per file name.

Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Jan 19^th, 2018 at 5:09pm:

This notification?


I tinkered a bit with the Arduino IDE (v1.8.5) and found out that file names can only contain the following characters:

• 0-9, i.e. decimal ASCII codes 48-57
• A-Z, i.e. decimal ASCII codes 65-90
• a-z, i.e. decimal ASCII codes 97-122
• -, . and _, i.e. decimal ASCII codes 45, 46 and 95

Everything else is replaced with an underscore.


Anyway, to answer the question "Why does this guy wanna use strange characters?" many may have, the reason is that the project I'm working on (or rather the Visual Studio solution) has several different sub-projects (the Arduino project is just one of them) and the naming convention I use (which is pretty popular, especially in C#; see for example CodeHub or ShareX, two of the most popular C# repositories on Github) is to prefix a sub-project with the name of its parent project separated by a dot.
So, for example, I have:
- MyProject.Core
- MyProject.UI.Windows
- ...
- MyProject.Arduino

Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Jan 21^st, 2018 at 2:21pm:

Yes, it does.

Thanks again for the report. Periods (dots) are now supported in all places (next release over next few days). 

The period has been removed from the reserved chars list and we no longer use the visual studio "$projectname" variable instead of "$safeprojectname" to create the initial .ino file.

In previous versions of visual micro the only way to have a period in the name was to use "File>Open>Arduino Project" to open empty (or populated) source code that already had the correct .ino and folder name.