I just read that the VisualGDB debugger can be used to debug esp8266 in Visual Studio, is this available within VM for arduino/esp8266 debugging?

No it's coming fairly soon but too difficult for most so not a priority right now.

I have reports that VisualGDB hogs Visual Studio and prevents visual micro from working.

Therefore, interested to hear how you get on thanks.

I haven't used GDB (or any debugger besides the VM serial debugger), does this mean that you would be able to debug an ESP8266 Arduino sketch and be able to see all variable values at any step and step through each line?  I'm assuming that you could have it easily skip going into library functions you want to ignore.

Sorry. Yes when Visual Micro implements GDB for esp8266 you will have line by line.

If you install VisualGDB you will not use Visual Micro and normal Arduino

Ok thanks I appreciate that your support is always good here.

Thanks

fwiw I have both VisualGDB and Visual Micro installed. They work independently on a per project (per solution?) basis; If a Visual Micro project is created, none of the VisualGDB features are available. I have not seen any unpleasant interaction between the two.

VisualGDB has rather robust JTAG debugging for single step, however it does not yet support the Arduino-style libraries. VisualMicro has great support of Arduino code, but I have yet to figure out how to use a JTAG programmer with it.

In the end, my go-to environment is VisualMicro due to the widely available and really awesome open source libraries from Adafruit, squix (e.g. weather station), the RadioHead libraries, and more. However I'm rather tired of all the Serial.println statements in my code.  ;)

I saw this link on "Arduino 3rd Party Hardware GDB Configuration Guide" and had hoped I could use a JTAG debugger with VisualMicro:

https://www.visualmicro.com/post/2016/01/17/3rd-Party-Hardware-GDB-Configuration-Guide.aspx

However, from the April 3 comment - it appears there's no support for ESP8266 JTAG? Any word on when something like Olimex or Segger support for ESP8266 or ESP32 might be coming?

Thanks for the update. GDB will be revisited after support for VS2012 and VS2013 ends during the next few months. Once they are out of the way we will be free to have a close tie to GDB using some of the new VS tools unavailable or too cumbersome to support in older IDE versions.


Quote:

In the end, my go-to environment is VisualMicro due to the widely available and really awesome open source libraries from Adafruit, squix (e.g. weather station), the RadioHead libraries, and more. However I'm rather tired of all the Serial.println statements in my code.  Wink

The Visual Micro debugger has better pin and graphical reporting than GDB but isn't as "live" when it comes to changing breakpoints during run-time. It does support changing variable values, gives some use trace/performance stats and avoids the need for serial.println().

That said I am looking forward to GDB if it works well on esp. Not as simple to setup for most users but some good tutorials will help.

vMicro now supports a range of additional hardware debuggers out of the box - including GDB Stub options for boards like ESP8266 and Arduino Uno where JTAG/SWD interfaces may be limited.

ESP8266 GDB Stub Debugging: https://www.visualmicro.com/page/ESP8266-Debugging.aspx

ESP32 Hardware Debugging: https://www.visualmicro.com/page/ESP32-Debugging.aspx

Debugger List: https://www.visualmicro.com/page/DebuggerSupportList.aspx