A few years ago I bought a licence for Visual Micro. Today I’ve bought another. If you are serious about Arduino development you should take a look at it. It is the best way to make code for the Arduino and has a really good terminal, all accessible inside Visual Studio.
This is awesome. It might have been in earlier versions of Visual Studio, but I’ve only just noticed it. One snag of using the lovely code navigation features is that you can end up with lots of windows open that you don’t need any more. So, now you can right click on the tab for an open file and this very useful menu pops up. Close all but this does just what you want. It gets rid of all the other windows and just leaves you back where you want to be. If you’ve got several panes open (a great idea if you have a wide monitor) it only closes the tabs in that pane.
Very useful.
Last week I got an email from Zefanja who was having problems using Snaps with Visual Studio 2019.
Snaps are an essential element of my “Begin to Code with C#” book, and if you can’t get them to work the book text doesn’t work very well. So I’ve made a new video that explains how to set your PC up.
I was just about to send Zefanja a message about this when he has got in touch saying that he has fixed his problem. Anyhoo, if anyone else is using Snaps with Visual Studio 2019 they might find this useful.
Update: Carlos got in touch telling me that the audio was a bit quiet. It was. Something to do with a setting on my little mixer being too low. So I’ve made a new louder version - effectively I’ve turned everything up to 11 for this one. The link above is to the louder one. If you prefer the quieter original you can find it here.
It turned out that the hardest part of installing Visual Studio 2019 was freeing up the 18 GB or so of space that was required. If you are installing it for use with Snaps from my wonderful Begin To Code with C# book you can do a very ordinary installation, but you do need to select to two options that I’ve marked in red above.
If you do this you should find that the Snaps you can download from GitHub here should just work.
If it doesn’t work please let me know. It might work just for me because I have some libraries already on my machine. I’m going to try with an “empty” machine, but I need to set it up.
Update: If you are finding the image hard to read, make sure that you select Universal Windows Platform Development and Windows 10 SDK 10.0.18632
I’ve recorded a screencast of the presentation that I gave for Barclays AI Frenzy. Such fun.
...when I try to edit a program that is running (something which I do rather a lot these days - I think it's because I'm getting old) I get this "helpful" message.
It would be even more helpful if the dialog contained another button I could press to stop the application and return me to the code that I'm trying to edit.
Update
It turns out that this has already been requested on UserVoice. If you go here you can upvote it. Please do. I'd love to see the feature.
Today I found out something that I didn't know that Visual Studio could do. It can perform file comparison. This is really useful if you've made a tiny change to a file for a very good reason at the time, but have completely forgotten where the change is, or why you made it. I never do this kind of thing myself you understand, but I've heard that some programmers make this mistake from time to time.
There are lots of file comparison tools out there of course, along with quite a few plugins, but it's nice to see that Visual Studio can do it right out of the box.
The only problem is that that finding the function is a bit tricky. You have to use the Command Window (which you open using CTRL+W, followed by A) or by selecting it from the View menu (take a look in the "Other Windows area if you can't find it).
Once you've got the command window you can type in the command Tools.Difffiles followed by the names of the two files you want to compare. There is some rather neat auto-completion of filenames which makes it a bit easier to navigate to the files that you want, and I love the idea of being able to type three f's in a row in a meaningful context.
Anyhoo, the comparison window that you get is rather nice, and it works well.
Oh joy. You can now write Python in Visual Studio 2017. Just install the updates and then you can add it as a language. There's a nice set of web pages that describe how to get started here.
I've had a play and it seems to work quite well.
Visual Studio 2017 came out yesterday. And today I downloaded my copy. I was keen to find out what was happening with the Python support.
What can I say? I like Python.
Anyhoo, Python is not in the release version of Visual Studio 2017, which is sad. But, you can still get all that crazy Python goodness (along with Intellisense and a lot of other neat stuff) by going here and following the link to download a pre-release version of Visual Studio 2017 with Python built in (which actually works alongside your "proper" install). Which is great.
I bought Visual Micro a while back. Not that I really needed to. The free version is actually plenty powerful enough for day-to-day use. It was just that I thought the product was so good that I really should support it.
For a registration you get a key that works on three machines. I've been through a few machines over the years (as you do) and last week I found that my key didn't work for my desktop. I emailed them, they cleared the key and I'm back in business again. Thanks folks.
If you are in any way serious about embedded development you should get this tool. The free Arduino SDK is OK for a while, but you'll fairly quickly hit limitations that will grate, and with Visual Micro you get all the lovely intellisense support and general niceness that comes with developing code in Visual Studio.
Visual Micro now works with all the esp devices and pretty much anything Arduino shaped as well. It's got some very interesting debugging support too, but I tend to rely on code instrumentation (print statements) when I'm writing embedded code, so I don't use it very much. Go get it.
I spent a big chunk of today trying to get Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition onto my machine. It put up a bit of a fight, I kept getting an error saying I needed up upgrade my installation when I'd built a project. I've no idea what the problem was.
But I do know how to fix it.
I installed Visual Studio from the ISO image that I downloaded from here. For previous, failed, installations I'd used the web installer. I'm wondering if there were some network shenanigans causing problems during the install.
The wonderful news is that I took my entire Snaps framework (a bunch of programming aids you are going to hear a *lot" about soon) and ported it from Windows 8.1 universal app to Windows 10 in about six minutes. All I had to do was copy the source files into an empty Windows 10 project and it built first time. This is completely awesome.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
