No thanks to the 'Visual Micro Administrator', I found the solution to my problem of programming a Sparkfun Pro Micro board.
Here's what he should have said:
Go to this page:
[url=[/url]
https://www.visualmicro.com/page/User-Guide.aspx?doc=First-steps.html]https://www.visualmicro.com/page/User-Guide.aspx?doc=First-steps.html[/url][/url]
or this page:
https://www.visualmicro.com/page/User-Guide.aspx?doc=Advanced-Config-Manager.htm... And note there is a field for 'Optional additional board manager urls...." (shows as callout "4" on the 'first steps page and as callout "2" on the 'advanced config' page)
And then note there is a link to the 'unofficial list of 3rd party boards', ie.
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki/Unofficial-list-of-3rd-party-boards-supp... On the above site is a huge list of 3rd-party board manager providers. Scroll down to the Sparkfun section and copy/paste the link into the 'optional additional board managers' field. Now the Sparkfun boards will show up in the Visual Micro Explorer's 'Manage Boards' tab.
Click on 'Board Platform Installer' to expand it, scroll down to the Sparkfun section, and install 'Sparkfun AVR Boards'.
After this, you should be able to select the Pro Micro from the boards dropdown list, as shown here
Compiling 'DigitalScale' for 'SparkFun Pro Micro w/ ATmega32U4 (5V, 16 MHz)'
You may need to close and restart your sketch/solution and /or VS2017 one or more times to make all this magic work, but this will either get you all the way there or very close.
And, to 'Visual Micro Administrator': Maybe you were having a bad day, but if you aren't going to be helpful, maybe you should find another line of work. My profile shows 'Senior Member' with 4 stars, and I have been a member of this forum for 7 years. Although I am certainly aware that longevity does not always equate to experience, surely I deserve more than "oh, that is for advanced users only <sniff>".
If you would really like to be helpful, how about a discussion of exactly what the differences and the pros/cons are regarding the 'No IDE' version of VM vs the 'IDE' version, so us poor beginners have some idea of the tradeoffs. I chose the 'no IDE' option during a recent PC upgrade because it (at the time) seemed to be more convenient and neater than installing an IDE that I didn't plan to use at all. If there are significant drawbacks to this approach, I'd like to hear about them.
Regards,
Frank