Usability of Visual Studio + power of GDB:
Sysprogs UG releases VisualGDB

05 April 2012. Sysprogs UG releases a Visual Studio add-in that allows building and debugging embedded firmware, remote Linux applications and supports many other scenarios based on GCC and GDB.

For many years software developers have been split into 2 different camps: the Visual Studio users enjoying the comfort and usability of this powerful IDE, but limited to making Windows apps, and embedded developers using GCC and GDB with less powerful IDEs that support the GNU toolchains.

VisualGDB combines the best from both worlds. The installation is simple: running the downloaded MSI file will automatically detect your Visual Studio installations and integrate with them. After installation a new item will appear in the "New Project -> Visual C++" window.

This new item allows creating MinGW and Cygwin applications, importing existing Make-based setups (e.g. debugging embedded GDB itself), creating and debugging embedded projects using cross-compiler toolchains and building/debugging Linux applications remotely. If device manufacturer did not provide a Windows toolchain, VisualGDB can run GCC/GDB remotely on a Linux machine and transfer the source files automatically.

The user can also control GDB directly by sending the usual GDB commands through the GDB session window.

Hacking and customizing things around is also possible. The wizard has a special "full-custom mode" where everything can be specified by hand. For example, sources can be transferred to a MacOS machine A, a kernel extension will be built there using X-Code, the binaries will be then sent to machine B, launched there and a kernel-mode debugger will be attached from machine A.

A free 30-day trial of VIsualGDB can be downloaded from the Download page.

About Sysprogs UG

Sysprogs UG is focused on providing usability-oriented developer tools. The company maintains several open-source projects, such as VisualDDK, VirtualKD, WinCDEmu and BazisLib.

Sysprogs UG delivers and supports VisualGDB - a powerful Visual Studio plugin that allows using Visual Studio with embedded and cross-platform applications.