Visual Studio Code Extension for Arduino is now open sourced! – IoT Developer: Tooling and Experience.

We are glad to share the news that the Visual Studio Code Extension for Arduino has been open sourced on GitHub.com at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-arduino! This is a great team effort to provide a good development experience for Arduino developers.

Microsoft embraces open source. Thousands of Microsoft engineers use, contribute to, and release open source every day across every platform, from the cloud to client operating systems.

Our team at Visual Studio IoT Tooling researched the development tools developers are using today, interviewed many developers to learn about their pain points developing IoT applications, and found that of all layers of IoT, there are abundant dev tools for cloud, gateway, interactive devices, and industrial devices, but limited availability and capability for micro-controllers and sensors. In particular for the MCU domain, there are millions of Arduino developers demanding advanced features to make their development with devices easier. Keeping open source and open platform in mind, we started the work to add an extension on Visual Studio Code, the cross-platform, open sourced advanced code editor, for Arduino application development.

Our Arduino extension fully embraces the Arduino developer community and is almost fully compatible and consistent with the official Arduino IDE. On top of it, we added the most sought-after features, such as IntelliSense, Auto code completion, and on-device debugging for supported boards.

Here is a list of the core functionalities:

• IntelliSense and syntax highlighting for Arduino sketches
• Verify and upload your sketches in Visual Studio Code
• Built-in board and library manager
• Built-in example list
• Built-in serial monitor
• Snippets for sketches
• Automatic Arduino project scaffolding
• Command Palette (F1) integration of frequently used commands (e.g. Verify, Upload…)
• Integrated Arduino Debugging New

For Arduino extension users, you can directly download and install the extension from Visual Studio Code Marketplace at: https://aka.ms/arduino. For developers, we encourage you to participate in this exciting open sourced project and work with developers around the world to make it a better tool!

The project is open sourced on GitHub under MIT License, and you can participate in different ways:

• File a bug, submit a feature request, you can find the current bug/issue list and feature requests at GitHub’s issue tracker.
• Join developers and users’ discussions at chat on gitter.
• Fork the repository, fix bugs and send pull requests
• Fork the repository, add your new cool features and send pull requests.

There are detailed instructions on how to get started for developing with the source code at our GitHub repo.
Try it out and share the news with your fellow Arduino developer friends!

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