New user impressions, platformio, and color scheme

[hak8or]

I have been dabbling with micro controllers for a few years now, jumping back and forth from IDE’s like TI’s Code Composer Studio and Atmel Studio, and manually using makefiles, Sublime Text, and command line tools. Every now and then I get frustrated as an IDE misses some feature I had when using command line, or vice versa, and try a new development environment. I started looking if I could somehow do my embedded work using Visual Studio and stumbled upon Visual Micro, but that fell short of my expectations partly due to me wanting to use it when working with chips that there is no Arduino support for, such as the STM32. I will still probably get it for myself since $30 as a student for it feels small enough to risk for trying it out long term. Then I found platformIO which seems flat out amazing, and I was able to have a LED blinking using Visual Studio for writing code and flashing the chip in just a few minutes. Sadly though, platformio does not have any debugging functionality built in.

And then I found you guys, and am very happy so far with the 30 day trial, and will likely make use of VisualGDB’s student pricing for use with my final semester project. Debugging works with both an onboard ST-Link V2 for my nucleo board and my standalone Segger J-Link EDU adapter, the automated toolchain install worked somewhat (described bug in suggestions), stepping through my C/C++ code worked, disassembly worked, and the accessible GDB session is awesome. And the hobbyst pricing of $90 is totally reasonable, especially considering how well this works with my Segger J-Link and the Nucleo on board ST-Link, the good chunk of tutorials on your site, and even more so considering how this project is under what seems to be under very active development along with the professional responses I see here on the forum. But then the 50% academic discount makes it even more awesome. Regardless, I did find some issues/bugs/hopeful future function requests VisualGDB might want to glance at.

• I am not sure if this goes beyond visualgdb’s territory, but being able to fill memory with a pattern so I can see how the stack was utilized would be pretty useful.
• Being able to step through assembly would have been awesome, but it seems I have to manually set breakpoints or keep right clicking on the assembly line and select “run to line”.
• The colors used for visualdgb windows seem to ignore me setting Visual Studio to a dark theme, making a seriously jarring experience. Is it possible to manually set the colors of the windows to something darker? Example: http://i.imgur.com/8RbCRwi.png
• The register view seems to not be polished much, considering there are three register windows with one(Registers) not even putting line breaks between each register, the other (Auto’s) only displays the categories without registers, and Hardware Registers understandably lacking things like the stack pointer and program counter. Example: http://i.imgur.com/cOt3XFI.png
• During toolchain installation, the installation bar kept kept getting stuck at ~5% and a popup appeared saying “an exception occurred during a web client request” when I selected to install the toolchain for all users, even when running with administrator privileges. If I select to just install for the current user (myself), it installed without issues.
• TI’s Code Composer Studio has the ability to automatically compile the project under o0 through 03 for size vs speed and show the resulting code size to the user. While it’s used rarely, it does help give an idea of how small the code will be when optimizations are enabled without having to manually enable said optimizations during debugging/writing software.
• A dedicated slider/drop down for optimizations in speed vs space instead of having to manually add the flags would have been nice.
• It seems that the MCU used in the NUCLEO-F303RE (STM32F303RET6) isn’t in the available MCU’s list for visualgdb. Luckily the STM32F303RC seems to be working as is for GPIO and initial dabbling with.
• Have there been any consideration of branching out to the Clion IDE or for experimental support of the Clang compiler?

And most importantly for me:

• Having visualgdb play nice with platformio somehow (basically have a way to import a platformio generated visual studio project including the framework, and even potentially “platformio run” support) would be amazing. The platformio people did an awesome job with it being cross platform and automated fetching + updated of frameworks like mbed and libOpenCM3. Sadly, VisualGDB also seems to lack the ability to select if I want to use an Mbed, libOpenCM3 , or SPL framework for my stm32 nucleo board when creating the initial project. I have not yet tried to manually import the project and attempt to mush it together with a visualgdb created project though.

 

Thanks for your time and making such an awesome product be affordable by a lowly student! Hopefully at least most of these suggestions made sense, since I seem to have ran out of coffee this morning.

 

[hak8or]

Oh whoops, I forgot to add what version of Visual Studio I have installed and whatnot in case you have difficult reproducing the bug I had during the toolchain installation:

 

Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2013
Version 12.0.31101.00 Update 4
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 4.5.51650

Installed Version: Professional

Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013   06177-004-0446034-02090
Microsoft Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013

Visual Basic 2013   06177-004-0446034-02090
Microsoft Visual Basic 2013

Visual C# 2013   06177-004-0446034-02090
Microsoft Visual C# 2013

Visual C++ 2013   06177-004-0446034-02090
Microsoft Visual C++ 2013

Visual F# 2013   06177-004-0446034-02090
Microsoft Visual F# 2013

Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker   06177-004-0446034-02090
Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker

Portions of International CorrectSpell™ spelling correction system © 1993 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

Windows Phone SDK 8.0 – ENU   06177-004-0446034-02090
Windows Phone SDK 8.0 – ENU

Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio Package   1.0
Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio

ASP.NET and Web Tools   12.4.51016.0
Microsoft Web Developer Tools contains the following components:
Support for creating and opening ASP.NET web projects
Browser Link: A communication channel between Visual Studio and browsers
Editor extensions for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Page Inspector: Inspection tool for ASP.NET web projects
Scaffolding: A framework for building and running code generators
Server Explorer extensions for Microsoft Azure Websites
Web publishing: Extensions for publishing ASP.NET web projects to hosting providers, on-premises servers, or Microsoft Azure

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2012.2   4.1.21001.0
For additional information, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=309563

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2013   5.2.21010.0
For additional information, visit http://www.asp.net/

Common Azure Tools   1.3
Provides common services for use by Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Tools.

JetBrains ReSharper Ultimate 2015.1   Build 102.0.20150408.145317
JetBrains ReSharper Ultimate package for Microsoft Visual Studio. For more information about ReSharper Ultimate, visit http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper. Copyright © 2015 JetBrains, Inc.

Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools   1.3
Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools

NuGet Package Manager   2.8.60318.734
NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio. For more information about NuGet, visit http://docs.nuget.org/.

Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 ENU   12.0.30626
Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 ENU

PowerShell Tools   1.3
Provides file classification services using PowerShell

PreEmptive Analytics Visualizer   1.2
Microsoft Visual Studio extension to visualize aggregated summaries from the PreEmptive Analytics product.

VisualGDB   4.3
Allows developing and debugging Embedded, Linux, Android and other GCC/GDB-based applications with Visual Studio.

Windows Phone 8.1 SDK Integration   1.0
This package integrates the tools for the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK into the menus and controls of Visual Studio.

Workflow Manager Tools 1.0   1.0
This package contains the necessary Visual Studio integration components for Workflow Manager.

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