@marsfan

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The new Arduino Pro IDE looks really nice and it is a massive improvement over the current IDE, but it is becoming a royal pain to have to install a new IDE for every different board/framework that I work with (Arduino, MBED OS, Cypress PSOC, Microchip PIC, etc).

Describe the solution you'd like

Release the Pro IDE not only as a standalone application, but as an extension that users can download into Visual Studio Code.

Describe alternatives you've considered

All of the alternatives that I have listed here do indeed work, but none of them would be as simple as just installing an extension through Visual Studio Code.

Arduino Pro Ide

• Advantages
  • It just works
  • Similar UI to existing Arduino IDE
• Disadvantages
  • Requires installer a whole new IDE just to program Arduino
  • No Additional Board manager URL in GUI Config

Microsoft Arduino Extension

• Advantages
  • Quick and easy to install in VS Code
  • Works out of the box if Arduino IDE is already installed
• Disadvantages
  • UI is of low quality
  • Lacks ability to identify problems without verifying/compiling sketch
  • Output from verification/compilation is messy, due to use of arduino_debug.exe
  • Output from verification/compilation does not appear in problems list, nor displays in color.
  • No Additional Board manager URL Config Menu

VS Code Task creation

• Advantages
  • Lots of Customization
  • Built into VS Code
  • Supports Problem Matching with VS Code
• Disadvantages
  • Requires lots of manual tweaking for each individual project.
  • Cannot easily define a GUI-based method for defining board/serial port.
  • No Boards or Library Manager, must use Arduino IDE to add new boards or libraries.

Platformio IDE

• Advantages
  • Large Feature Set (Even more features than Pro IDE depending on board)
  • Available as an extension for many different IDE
  • Features some board not currently supported in the Arduino IDE
• Disadvantages
  • Does not support all Arduino Compatible board (Sparkfun Artemis being an example at the time of writing)
  • Requires additional configuration to support using Arduino Framework.

Additional context

• The release notes in the Pro IDE mention moving the language feature to be a VS Code extension. This suggests that the framework to bundle the features into is already in place behind the scenes (which I cannot verify as the project is not open-source). Furthermore, as VS Code supports extension bundles (see [vscode-pack-arduino)[https://github.com/mpty-ltd/vscode-pack-arduino/] as an example), refactoring existing extensions into one full extension is not necessary.
• VS Code supports adding a preview flag, to indicate to users that the extension is still in beta and subject to change. (See Microsoft's own PowerShell extension as an example, specifically Line 5 of package.json
• While this suggestion adds complication to the project, moving forward with open-sourcing this project (as discussed in the early announcement blog post), can mitigate this by adding many more developers to the project. I am sure that most developers interested in contributing to this project will not mind having to work around with alpha stage code.