Hi Erwin,

Debugger Beta

The debugger beta lasted many months but ended on 1st May 2013. 

There was a free offer during the past month for anyone who joined the beta team and supported the product.

If you were a beta tester you will read in the link that was emailed a few weeks ago that the current free offer is still open for anyone who posted a review or blog on the internet or contributed to the beta program via the forum. The link also explains how to claim the free license.

If you are not eligible for the free version it is still available at a reduced rate starting at $14.

All versions of the debugger:- trial, free, reduced and fully paid are the same. The free license is for a single machine install.

Standard Plugin

As concerns the features of the standard plugin you should install it and give it a try. Your program will remain compatible with Arduino so if you do not like it you can switch back to the Arduino Ide.

All "important features" currently means compile, upload, programmer support, examples, libraries, custom boards, serial etc. everything need to program an Arduino or Arduino clone. 

There are other features such as color code of Arduino keywords that are not provided but do not hinder development, there are a wealth of additional features or improved features such as faster compiler, change sketchbook folder without re-start and more. 

Example: In the case of keywords:- We don't support Arduino keyword color syntax because Visual Studio and Atmel Studio provide syntax color management in a vastly superior way to Arduino. I hope you can see that with this single example alone we can't say "all features" but that does not mean that Visual Micro is incapable. In fact if you find the time to read the reviews from users it is probably the opposite.

It is important to bear in mind that whilst Visual Micro might support all of the key Arduino features today, tomorrow Arduino might release a version that breaks Visual Micro. In which case we would need to produce a new version of Visual Micro. Therefore we can only say what is possible today and with enough support through sales we will hope to make the product better and keep up the development cycle.

In terms of support, we would like to think that anyone who has purchased will be supported forever but that depends on demand and cost of supporting users. So we have committed to free updates for at least 2 years for all paid users.

For non paid users we can make no commitment except to say that product and support has been provided entirely for free during the 3 years preceding May 1st 2013. So for as long as enough people pay for the debugger and people use the wiki and forum to answer questions then we will be able to afford to carry the freebies

Currently the plugin is free. We would hope this will always be the case however this depends on how much community help we get and how much "hand holding" user require. With this in mind we also make the commitment that should we start to charge for the main product at any future time we will automatically upgrade all paid debugger licenses to the full product for free.

I am pleased you found the answer(s) to your other questions and can only recommend that you install and try the combination to determine if you Arduino development can be made easier.

You mentioned Arduino 0022 in your email, debug support is for Arduino 1.0.1 forward and currently recommended for 1.0.4

I hope this answers your questions, let me know if anything is not clear

Thanks