#375 Is Visual Micro the better Arduino IDE? Including ESP32 inline debugger

Many of us want a better tool than the Arduino IDE with more functionality and still the same ease of use. As we saw in an earlier video, one way to go is PlatformIO. Today we will test another tool that viewers proposed and see if it is any good: Visual Micro with its hardware debugger.
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[AndreasSpiess]

Visual Micro only works on Windows. I should have mentioned it in the video. Sorry for that.

[waltsteinchen]

20 years ago i worked for a company where we build JTAG Debuggers (for the Pentium CPU). The reason why you are limited to 4 breakpoints is that these breakpoint get serially shifted into 4 special registers inside the CPU. They are simple address comparators that finally can halt the cpu. There are just 4 of those registers, that's the reason why you can have just 4 breakpoints .. but that should be enough for most scenarios.

[lohikarhu]

Danke Andreas, it's great to have you do these overviews and comparisons across different working methods and environments, a big help in pointing in the right direction for different kinds, and levels, of projects!

[Salfke]

After your video, i started using Visual Micro; i spend hours converting arduino sketches, and i wasn't sattisfied; because of the errors and the lots of work. switching was a great option; thanks for your video, it saved me a lot of time!

[murrij]

Thank you Andreas for this. Using hardware instead of serial looks really cool. I can't tell you many times I've forgotten the Serial window was open and watched my upload to the board fail.

[Payder]

Love your channel! Thank you very much! Greetings from Bavaria

[blic-sxix]

Looks like this IDE might be the sweet spot between ease of use and capability I have been looking for. I am installing now. I gave your channel a mention when I signed up for their forums. Thanks Andreas!

[rawi-bn]

I was a Visual Studio developer when I started Arduino in 2010 and was happy to be able to use my preferred development environment with Visual Micro. I lost track of it when I started with ESP8266. Thank you Andreas for bringing it back to my mind.

[PATRIKKALLBACK]

Thank you Andreas for your information video. I have been using Visual Studio for many years and used with its C++ debugging. I will start to test Visual Micro as an IDE for my Arduino projects.

[peter.stimpel]

so much input, right after I found some grip to platfirmio. Seems, this is what grey and rainy weekends are made for ... Thanks a lot.

[erikpeterson]

Thanks Andreas, this is very helpful! I always look forward to your postings.

[javierguerrerob]

Andreas thanks for sharing!!!
Amazing work.

[lagierfrederic]

Many Thanks for all your sharing. I paste the answer of Simon from vm for a post related to development under linux.
"Visual Micro is only compatible with the full Visual Studio 2019/2022 editions published for Windows at present to our knowledge."

[PascalRoobrouck]

Hi Andreas, I have used both Visual Micro and PlatformIO extensively and for large projects. I'd like to add a few things to your comparison.
1. The serial port in VM is much more stable than PIO. You can plug the device in and out of the USB ports, and the serial monitor just keeps working. Not so with PIO.
2. On a multi-monitor setup, Visual Studio works much better than Visual Studio Code. The latter does not allow 1 instance to have several windows, whereas Visual Studio allows you to arrange the windows any way you want it, even over multiple monitors.
3. In Visual Studio you can test (HW independent) library code by compiling it for windows. All the powerful debugging features are available. You can use the built in unit testing framework to thoroughly test your libraries.
4. I use multiple projects in one solution a lot! It is the perfect way to write smaller test-programs to test-drive your library components. This way your main program, your libraries and your test code stays together. (a simple example : when you develop an arduino library, the library itself and the example projects are all separate projects in one solution).
Of course it is a personal matter, to some extent, but I've found myself always more productive on VM than on PIO. Thank you for your inspiring video's and I hope to meet you once in real life somewhere, someday where we can talk about our projects. Pascal

[Simon_Rafferty]

Thanks Andreas. I've finally had enough of the Arduino 2.X IDE - and was wishing it was more like Visual Studio. It looks like Visual Micro might be the answer!

[jamesmichener]

I have used Visual Micro for over 11 years now, and have not found anything that I couldn't do. To understand the environment it is equally complex and has a long learning curve to really know all the features. So, it is the devil you know, vs the devil you don't know. I like having compatibility with Arduino IDE, having this feature defeats the ability to control libraries versions the 'easy' way. Having Arduino IDE compatibility means you can hand off source to a newbie so they can make changes easily. Excellent video as usual.

[sazviki]

Visual Studio is surely a friendly looking IDE for embedded programming.

I look forward for your future videos on FreeRTOS!

[FindLiberty]

VERY NICE - $12/yr - sold! *Thank you for sharing your knowledge and skills with us.*

I needed this break from my FLCCC health study. Please take care of you and yours.

[akj]

The best approach i found is to use the best of both worlds:
1. Open Arduino IDE (Advantages: easy to use, libraries available, default IDE and therefore many tutorials online in case of errors, all possible boards supports, ...), go into the settings and enable external IDE.
2. Open CLion (Advantage: High Level C++/C/Python IDE with autocompletion, ClangTidy, ... support) on the project from above and program here.
3. Compile in the Arduino IDE and use the Serial monitor from it.

[chrisvanaalst]

Andreas, again thx for the excellent videos you create ... first thing I watch Sunday's after my breakfast :) I've been using the Arduino IDE for 4-5 years and gave PlatformIO a try last year, mainly because I had to deal with specific Library-versions & different hardware. It did work, but as a hobbyist I found it too complex for me.
Visual Micro seemed an ideal solution and I gave it a try; I've created a Solution with one Project inside as you showed in your video. I used the 'Clone for project when using libraries' with the 'Library versions', , this is exact what I need and it works fine. Gave the (serial) debugging a try and again excellent.

But there is one thing I cannot find how to do, probably because I am not used to work with VS 2019 / Visual Micro : in the Arduino IDE, I regularly use the 'Save as ...' with a postfix version (-v1, -v2, ....) to have a copy of my versions while developing. But I cannot find how to do this with VS 2019/Visual Micro - if we keep the one solution/one project structure, I need to clone or copy the solution and rename (all solution/project files)? Although having multiple versions of a project in a solution could also work for me ? But there does not seem to be easy method for that - using a full-fledged version-mgt system will again make this too complex ?
Do you or anyone else have some recommendations how to handle this ?