Visual Studio + Arduino
Visual Micro Requirements
Visual Studio
Welcome to the world of Visual Studio
Installing Visual Micro
IntelliSense
Code Documentation
Arduino IDE Environment Color in Visual Studio
Blinking an LED

Published February 25, 2016 © CC BY-SA

Arduino + Visual Studio = Fast Dev.

Take your Arduino Codes to the next level with easy auto completion and documentation in Visual Studio, it's very simple & fast.

BeginnerProtip1 hour67,913

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Arduino UNO

UTSOURCE Electronic Parts

Software apps and online services

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015

Story

Visual Studio + Arduino

This tutorial needs no prerequisites.

Most of us use Arduino on daily basis. To be honest developing using Arduino IDE is a bit hard as you need to type everything yourself, it gets tedious if you want to keep your code clear and easy to understand

On the other hand, Visual Studio makes the development process so smooth and enjoyable, it helps you with whatever you want. It's also very comfortable for the eye as it has 3 different color schemes.

In this tutorial we'll do the following

Download and install Visual Studio
Install Visual Micro
Upload a sketch to the Arduino using Visual Micro

Visual Micro Requirements

Arduino IDE Installed, you can download it here or use this link for windows installer and press " just download " if you don't want to donate

Visual Studio

Visual Sutdio is a great tool from Microsoft. It's available in many versions, in this tutorial we'll use the free version ( Visual Studio Community Edition ).

To download Visual Studio, visit this link.

Visual Studio 2015 supports many versions of Windows down to windows 7

Click on Visual Studio 2015, then choose a download version ( ISO /Web Installer)

After you have downloaded the ISO file / Online installer double click on it and launch vs_community.exe (as I'm not connected to the internet the setup will give me a warning because it won't be able to download extra features, but this is pretty fine in our case), then chose the install type custom and a directory of your choice

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Next we'll go over to the feature list, make sure you choose C++ ( you don't need windows xp support )

Then hit Next, it takes a while to complete installation

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After the setup completes, you can login with your Microsoft account ( @hotmail, ..etc) or you can just Not now, maybe later then choose your favorite color theme

then it'll take a couple of mins to load for the first time.

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Welcome to the world of Visual Studio

Let's start exploring by clicking new Project -> Visual C++

Nothing related to Arduino ? hmm.. Now let's install the Visual Micro plug-in

Installing Visual Micro

After you've installed Visual Studio with C++, you need to install the FREE plugin which is called Visual Micro, it contains many features such as:

Boards
Serial Monitor
COM ports
Build
Build and Upload
Add library
Debug code ( not for free )

Click here to download Visual Micro plugin for Visual Studio 2012 to 2015. After downloading you get

then install it

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if you have any problems during the installation you can visit the FAQ section here

Now let's run Visual Studio again.

The Visual Micro plugin will ask you about which version of Arduino IDE is installed on your pc and will try to locate it. -make sure the Arduino IDE is installed-

If it doesn't allocate, mostly the Arduino IDE is installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino

Then choose start trial, you can still use the Visual Micro plugin normally even if the trial ends, it's also free for commercial use! ( I was mistaken when I mentioned before that it wasn't free for commercial use )

and you can also get many extra features if you purchase it

Click Start trial if you'll use it for free

Now, head back to the New Project window, you'll find Arduino Project entry, Choose a name for the solution and click OK.

Now you should notice the following differences

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now if I start typing, the suggestion list will popup but it doesn't seem to be very helpful at this moment because it doesn't highlight an entry automatically

IntelliSense

IntelliSense is such a great tool in Visual Studio which is one of the biggest reasons why I use Visual Studio to code anything even if it requires a long search for plugins, read more about it and why it can help you learn faster, here

To make IntelliSense auto selects an entry we'll start by opening the Tools menu then select options

Then Text Editor => C/C++ => Advanced

Set the entry of Member List Commit Aggressive to true then click OK, let's try typing again. ( I changed the theme of Visual Studio to Light just for the sake of having clear contrast between the text and background)

Now it highlights the entry normally, you can directly hit the ( . ) -period- and it'll auto complete the typing. then all you need to type is about 2 or 3 letters for each variable instead of the full variable name in Arduino IDE, which makes you easily pickup a slightly long descriptive names for your variables and functions.

It can also give you suggestions by hitting ( CTRL + Space ) then you can browse whatever you can type.

Code Documentation

Another great feature of intelliSense is code documentation. Check out the following image.

This image shows variable and function documentation simply by using comments

Can you imagine the power you have now ? just by typing simple comments, they appear as a documentation for functions and variables.

Either you're a code expert or a beginner or anywhere between, this will definitely help you improve your code style and reduces the amount of effort you need to make a good piece of code.

Arduino IDE Environment Color in Visual Studio

if you really like both the coloring of Arduino and IntelliSense, you can get the best of both worlds by changing the appearance of Visual Studio, in the following image the color is already set to Arduino IDE and it also illustrates how to set it just for the sake of saving space.

Blinking an LED

Now it's time to give it a try, Connect your Arduino and you'll find it in the port list if all is well.

After you finish typing the code you can either press the green or black play button

caption (optional)

After you've finished uploading, open the serial monitor

After you click the Serial Monitor pops up

Congratulations !! :)

Now you can simply and easily make large Arduino projects with Visual Studio and the tools available in it, please respect the project & share the knowledge if you like it.

You can also visit my other tutorials, check out electronic components on utsource.net

Arduino Color Mixer

Super Easy to Build 1Sheeld 2 Wheel Drive Robot

Best Regards,

LED Blink

// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
	// initialize digital pin 13 as an output.
	pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
	Serial.begin(9600);
}

// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
	digitalWrite(13, HIGH);   // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
	delay(1000);              // wait for a second
	digitalWrite(13, LOW);    // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
	Serial.println("A Cycle Completed");
	delay(1000);              // wait for a second
}

Credits

Ahmed Hamdy Mahmoud Hassanein

8 projects • 129 followers

I'm a Muslim Computer Engineer, I do a bit of hardware and any software I'm glad to receive your questions >> ahmedhamdyau@gmail.com peace!

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Arduino + Visual Studio = Fast Dev.

Arduino + Visual Studio = Fast Dev.

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Software apps and online services

Story

Visual Studio + Arduino

Visual Micro Requirements

Visual Studio

Welcome to the world of Visual Studio

Installing Visual Micro

IntelliSense

Code Documentation

Arduino IDE Environment Color in Visual Studio

Blinking an LED

Code

LED Blink

Credits

Ahmed Hamdy Mahmoud Hassanein

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