Hi All,
We are proud to announce that VisualGDB, a Visual Studio extension for advanced cross-platform development, now fully supports the MAIX Dock board.
Any feedback or suggestions will be highly appreciated.
So what does VGDB offer that Platform IO does not, and its free.
We have tried your VGDB with the ESP32 and it was such a hassle to get working right, whereas Platform IO just worked out of the box.
PlatformIO is based on Visual Studio Code, that generally works well for smaller projects, but doesn’t provide much GUI for advanced tasks. If you try to manage ESP-IDF components, set compiler flags, configure advanced debug settings, etc., you will quickly end up manually editing build scripts and JSON files, while VisualGDB provides intuitive GUI for most of these tasks.
On top of that, VisualGDB comes with an advanced memory explorer that can compare multiple builds, various debug GUI facilitating common debugging tasks (see VisualGDB’s Embedded Eeatures) and comes with a non-intrusive debugging engine that can let you explore the state of your ARM or RISC-V program while it is running in the background.
It’s hard to say why VisualGDB was hard-to-use with ESP32. Perhaps you tried using VisualGDB with the ESP-IDF framework (that has a somewhat steep learning curve), and PlatformIO with the Arduino core, that is much more beginner-friendly? Either way, VisualGDB also supports the ESP32 Arduino core.