Sigh, I'm sorry - I tried everything I could think of, but I'm out of ideas.

Fresh install of VS2015 with VM extension, fresh install of Arduino 1.6.8. Tried downloading Cosa 1.1 and 1.2 via both the VM board manager and manually to the Arduino IDE (before installing VM - I've done a lot of rollbacks!)

I can select the vanilla Uno, paste in the Blink example and compile for debug just fine.

If I select the Cosa Uno and paste in the CosaBlinkMinimal example, it compiles perfectly - in Release.

As soon as I switch to Debug...boom. A ton of errors related to redefining and overloading. 

From looking at previous forum posts and the VM_DBG file, it looks like you should be able to support debugging with Cosa...so I can't work out what I'm missing, or whether I've installed incorrectly.

I've attached two text files with the results of the build output, and can test/change anything you need if you need additional help/info.

VS is my IDE of choice for all my coding, and Arduino debugging is something I would seriously love to take advantage of - but Cosa has way too many advantages for me to switch back to vanilla just to get to debug.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Yep - that got me pointed in the right direction. Discovered I don't even need to technically "load" the different versions, I can just replace files under hardware/Cosa, force a VM rescan and replicate the error on demand.

With this, I narrowed down the single cause to the boards.txt file - I can install 1.2, replace that single file with the 1.1.1 version and compile without error.

Analyzing the file changes (apart from the significant number of boards deleted), there was only one difference...

v1.1.1

uno.build.core=cosa 

v1.2

uno.build.core=Cosa:cosa 

I had a (somewhat blind) hunt around the rest of the source and online to try to figure out what the significance of the colon might be, but couldn't find anything that mentioned it. 

Had a quick look back at the original thread I found, and based on http://www.visualmicro.com/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1421322718/11#11 I'm going to guess that broke your automatic detection of Cosa core boards

So, I just did a search/replace on the 1.2 boards.txt file, replacing Cosa:cosa with cosa, and success. I was able to compile, upload and hit the breakpoint without any problems.

Now with that said, I couldn't get @ReportDigital working - either with v1.1.1 or v1.2. The original thread said you were having issues, but I was hoping there'd been progress over the last year  

Is there anything we/I can do to help? Is it still related to the idea that the pins are hardcoded constants?

On a side note, I'm getting intellisense errors on macro defined functions (such as PSTR). Intellisense correctly identifies the related #define command, but throws a "expected an expression" error...and I'm not sure how to (or if it's possible to) manipulate the header file to counter this
(as per Extending-Visual-Studio-Intellisense.aspx).

Thanks for your speed response so far, much appreciated. A pro license is already pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point. If I can get the pin reads working, it's guaranteed

That was fast! Looks like that got it, glad to have helped.

Any ideas on the digitalRead error or advice on fixing the macro intellisense errors?

Also, for future reference, do you prefer multiple threads to be created for multiple issues to assist with tracking, or is lumping them together like this acceptable?

Thanks.

<edit>For what it's worth, I was able to get a read on a pin by putting

{Pin::read(Board::D2)} 

into the breakpoint action - I was toying with the idea of writing a function to go through each pin this way, but then realized the Expressions window would only show a single line  

Is there a way to have a single expression output multiple variables? I intercepted the serial output to see if I could add something, but it looks like you're doing all the heavy lifting on the IDE end
</edit>

Lol, wasn't expecting such a speedy response, your reply beat my edit above.

Thanks for the tip, I'll go poke in there and start a new thread if I discover anything.