I am a fairly seasoned software developer. I have used GIT with Visual Studio 2019 (and prior versions) for years now.  However, I'm just a little bit stymied by the implementation of Visual Micro, and how to best use GIT to track my projects because of the fact that it seems to want (strongly prefer) to store all projects in the MyDocuments/Arduino directory (which also happens to be where the libraries folder is located, which is huge).  I was thinking, well, I can just use the .gitignore file to ignore that entire folder.  But when I tried that, I get this strange error message:  "Invalid slug. Slugs must be lowercase, alphanumerical, and may also contain underscores, dashes, or dots."  I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I'd really prefer to store my projects in a different location, but when I went to configure that (the "Optional sketchbook location") it says "best to leave empty, also affects location of libraries and hardware".  And that seemed like a pretty good deterrent.  Why can't it be smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time?  I mean, this seems pretty crazy to me.  And it's hard for me to imagine not being able to use GIT with Visual Studio.

Any thoughts?

Dan

Thank you!  That was immensely helpful.  I think I understand a bit better now.  I just knew there had to be a good way to do this!  But it was just a little confusing.

This whole concept of using Visual Studio to do Arduino work seems like a bit of smoke and mirrors.  But I love the idea of being able to use an environment that I'm already quite familiar with!  The Arduino IDE is woefully inadequate by comparison.  And then I was trying using Visual Studio Code, and the plugins for Arduino that work with it, and was just getting myself more confused.  And then I found Visual Micro!  But without GIT (and SourceTree), that would be an incomplete solution, in my view.  Having some sort of source code management tool is essential to software development.

Again, thank you. 

Dan