Hi Frank,

You should not use the (no ide) option it is for advanced users and will cause you confusion. 

Please ensure you have VS2017 with C++ installed.

Install the Arduino IDE

Then use the Visual Micro IDE locations window to specify the location of you Arduino IDE installation.

Thanks

Hi Frank,

I was referring to advanced use of arduino and visual micro. This involves reading some of the docs to learn about extra flags or the micro explorer. Also requires an understanding of the structure of the arduino ide.

For example the arduino ide has built-in libraries which are lost when using no ide. So you find the library explorer and install some libs but that requires some support.

The arduino ide also installs an avr toolchain and some older toolchains give instruction of how to install avr extensions into the arduino ide hardware folder. So that would be confusing if you worked with that hardware now or in the future.

Installing avr via board manager is prone to issue because installing an arduino ide update in the future would then give two different versions of avr and lead to support issues. Hopefully they drop the avr from 1.9 when it comes out so users learn one way to find and install hardware via board manager.

Over the next months arduino 1.9 will be released with some new functionality. Visual Micro allows the different arduino versions to be used side by side and can query the ide folder to determine the version and subsequent functionality that visual micro should adhere to. When you drop the ide out of the picture things become less clear and less flexible unless you remain clear about what each ide provides.

So it's not a question of how experienced your VS or code is, it's just about Arduino

Recently you had a lib cache issue where you had changed some settings. Did the issue resolve after you reset your settings?