ESP8266 Community Forum

QuickFix wrote:I feel what you mean: I'm a Delphi (the Windows version of Pascal) developer by profession and I too miss the fancy gadgets "A real IDE" has in something like the Arduino IDE.
On the other hand: a cheap version of Delphi is somewhere in the region of $1500 while Arduino is free, so I understand it has to come from somewhere.

I've had a quick look at the Visual Studio solution a couple of months ago, but I remember reading that some very useful things (like flashing the ESP, monitoring the debug serial, ...) cannot be done from within the IDE and you have to resort to work-arounds.
In the end I lost interest (maybe also because I don't like VS that much) and moved on.

But that doesn't mean using VS is a bad choice (after all: I am biased).

Hello, have you tried using the extension platform.IO?
I have read that it is a great option.
I know that adaptation is time-consuming. I'm scared!
From the adaptation process.
But it will be better to have more tools at your disposal.
Even more for large projects.
Facilitates purification and organization.

I've been doing some Arduino and ESP development in the Visual Micro add-on for Visual Studio (community edition) and it's definitely more "pro" than the Arduino IDE, while still as easy to build and deploy with. I may even cough up US$65 for the licence.

I very quickly ditched the Arduino IDE and went to Eclipse IDE which will work for Arduino family, ARM and esp8266. I use the Sloeber plugin for esp8266. Flashing & serial monitor are integrated into Eclipse. I also use it for my Linux development and so it is a one stop shop for all my development which is ideal. Like anything an IDE is a personal choice and you will find that some people don't like Eclipse. There are many online guides on install & configuring it, however Sloeber does it all for you.

I have just started to try out the VS code development route and installed the basic extensions (c++, ms arduino).

My current arduino environment uses the 'portable' folder method as that allows me to have side by side esp8266 / esp32 hardware paths.

I'm not sure if the VS Code is going to work with this as the obvious method for bringing in the esp8266 support is by using the additional url method which I don't think will be compatible with the 'portable' method.

Anybody know if one can point VS Code arduino extension at the preferences / boards definitions more directly?