Notes from recent codeplex versions

1309
There are a number of minor additions to this release to cater for various recent events. Most will be documented in the forum and the wiki during the next few days/week. A few initial bullets...

* Initial support for Arduino 1.5.3 (released in beta by Arduino.cc a few days ago), there is a known bug that causes boards that have different cpus', such as Nano, to fail. There is a simple boards.txt hack that fixes it which we will publish if the next release takes more than a few days. Arduino 1.0.5 or 1.5.2 are currently recommended but any of the older Arduino versions will work.

* Initial support for Visual Studio 2013. One known minor bug is a popup error relating to intellisense. However build, upload, serial, debug etc all appear to work well. The installer for 2013 has not been tested so hopefully it gets the paths right and Visual Micro loads correctly for you.

* Minor fix to prevent the need to remove the arduino_robot libraries from 1.0.5 or 1.5.3

* A number of minor functionality changes can be disabled/enabled or changed using new properties in "Tools>Options>Visual Micro". These changes mainly apply to the debugger. See the Options under "Micro Debug - General" and� "Micro Debug - Automatic". Each new tools>options property has a hint/description.

* The 'Hit Counter' project property might not have always been defaulting to milliseconds as expected. Oops! This property can switch between millis and a counter. The default for new projects or projects where the property has not been altered by the user is now milliseconds but this default can now be altered via "Tools>Options>Visual Micro>Micro Debug - Advanced"

* Project debugging is now ON by default, when previously (Micro Debug) had to be enabled for the project/configuration. This change is to help new users. To disable this feature allowing each project to control debug (as in previous releases of visual micro) set "Tools>Options>Visual Micro>Micro Debug - Advanced>Always Use Debugger" = False. (Reminder: The command "Debug>Start without debugging" will ALWAYS start without debugging)

* If debugging is on AND there are no breakpoints defined then Visual Micro will automatically create a BreakPoint for the start of the loop() of the main sketch code. The BreakPoint that is created is for new users to more easily understand some of the BreakPoint properties. It runs at 4hz, has a dummy conditional expression and "watches" millis(). This automatic BreakPoint can be controlled via "Tools>Options>Visual Micro>Micro Debug - Automated". Set Auto Create TracePoint = False to switch off this feature alternatively add your own message/watch/condition (for all of your projects) using global expressions and variables. Delete the automatically created breakpoint if you change these properties, the BreakPoint will not automatically refresh with these changes. Once an automatically created BreakPoint has been added to a project it may be altered by the user. 

* Fix: {millis()} in debug watch expressions caused free memory graph, digital pin and analog animations to open but do nothing (sorry was a left over from testing)

* Fix: Pc serial reader reliability on shared debug port

* Debugger users might notice an additional delay on the Arduino when the debugger starts. In previous versions the default delay was 250ms which was designed to give the pc time to prepare for debug. This delay was often not long enough because so many factors can affect how long the pc takes to open windows and how long the micro-controller normally takes to start after upload. The default delay has been increased to 2000ms (2 seconds) however it can be overridden using the project property "Start-up Delay". If the delay is too short then breakpoints early in the loop() or in the setup() might be missed.

* more to follow in the forum

1308.29
* Serial reconnect if port disappears + debug restarts on reconnect

* Fix infrequent crashes in serial monit