I wanted to announce that we have added support for ESP8266 to VisualGDB, our Visual Studio plugin. It supports building the firmware with both IoT and RTOS SDKs, debugging with JTAG (we have fixed the evaluation of local variables) and it can even program SPI FLASH via JTAG. You can find a detailed tutorial here: [url]http://visualgdb.com/tutorials/esp8266/
[/url]
Feel free to share you feedback here.