Hi,

Thanks for the report we will prevent that message in future versions.

Does that fix the problem? This error means the arduino ide has never been run before, when it runs it creates a preferences.txt file that Visual Micro looks for.

Please run the arduino ide once and then close it.

Hi,

Ok, I am sorry you are having this problem.

Can you please open the Configuration window which is at the bottom of the applications combo box or in tools>options.

What path do you have set against the 1.0.x entry?

Thanks

Thanks. 

We will look into this later today or tomorrow and make a new service pack or remove the error.

Sorry and thanks very much for reporting the problem

EDIT: we have found this is a problem for windows xp users

previous visual micro versions are available here

Oh! Well it is good for us that you have reported this because it is a big problem for xp users!

Now to fix your problem...

I can tell you how to fix this but also really need you to tell me which bit was wrong so we can fix it properly.

When the Arduino ide starts for the first time it creates a textual setting file called preferences.txt in the following folder 'c:\users\[your_name]\appdata\Roaming\Arduino'

Visual Micro can't find the preferences.txt file in the folder.

To find the name of the 'Roaming' folder Visual Micro uses a windows environment variables called APPDATA.

I am keen to know what your APPDATA variable contains

Please click windows Start>Run>Cmd. When the cmd window opens input

SET APPDATA

The press ENTER on the keyboard.

What path is displayed? Based on what the path is we can decide if we want to create a folder called Arduino and copy the preferences.txt file from 'c:\users\[your_name]\appdata\Roaming\Arduino'. This would get you a working system until sp3 is produced.

Thanks

Hello,

APPDATA is case sensitive

MUST BE UPPERCASE, please try

Thanks

Hi,

You will see in this article that APPDATA is an official windows system variable but that some users have encountered a problem where their windows profile has not been created correctly. This was the cause of the problem.

But as you correctly say, in previous versions of visual micro it worked. This is because hard coded C# objects were used to find the Roaming location instead of environment variables. 

In the latest Visual Micro we have a user configurable build system so we need to use external environment variables that can be changed to something else by users. 

In sp3 we use the C# object to create an environment variable called VM_APPDATA_ROAMING which is then used in the Visual Micro configuration files instead of APPDATA. This will will be more robust solution similar to older Visual Micro versions.

Sp3 will be available shortly but you don't need it, although it will have other minor fixes/

Thanks for the good reports, I hope the reason for the problem on your win7 machine is understandable but not important it seems.