Automate the Arduino IDE for Visual Studio Interface

by Visual Micro 19. September 2012 15:22

We can build our own tool bar layouts or add shortcuts to frequently used Arduino commands to the Visual Studio user interface.

How To

Right click any Visual Studio tool strip and select "Customize" which will on the bottom of the right mouse menu.

When the Customize window opens (see below), click keyboard to assign shortcut keys. Click the  "Commands" tab to add commands to menus and tool bars.

When adding a command or shortcut the Visual Micro commands will be displayed under the "Addins" section 

Below you can see the possibility to add Arduino commands such as board selection to the "File" menu.

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Warning: On rare occassions Visual Studio becomes confused and which causes visual micro menus and tool bar controls to disappear. The documented solution for this problem is to use the visual studio resetaddin command. Running this command will remove any customizations you have made that reference visual.micro macros. I am not currently sure if it is possible to backup your customizations of the visual studio ide. The safest way to work might be to create a visual studio macro that creates the arduino buttons, shortcuts and menus based on visual micro micros. Doing so allows you to re-run your macro and re-create your customizations at any time in the future.

Automate arduino development using visual studio

by Visual Micro 11. April 2010 08:16

You may add any of the visual micro arduino commands to the visual studio tool bars and menus. You may also reference the commands in your visual studio macros. Serial ports, libraries, boards are also available as commands.

Example

The "Arduino Mega" will appear as a visual studio command (Tools, Customise), COM23 (if it exists) will also appear as a command, the SoftwareSerial library will also appear as a command.

Therefore you could add there new tool bar buttons for each providing a "one click" option to select options you use regularly. or you can create a workflow (macro) that automatically selects the "mega" board, sets COM23 and includes the software serial library into the current project.

Example: Customise Visual Studio Arduino Commands

 

Unsupported Upload Note

The compiler outputs .hex files into the <project>\_vsaddin\_build folder. The addin projects can be run from the visual studio command line. This makes it possible to design windows applications using visual stuidio that upload different arduino sketches based upon conditional factors. If you use the arduino visual studio compiler or the arduino uploader then please beaware that no liability is accepted by us and that you will break your arduino warranty