Any reason I can't use Visual Studio?

[Ian McTavish]

Hi, I've started a Rookie team and we're getting to work. For programming I'm most comfortable with C++ out of the available languages. At our school we use Visual Studio for our IDE. Is there any reason I can't use this for the competition (obviousely I need to set up the libraries).
Thanks for your help.

[Zuelu562]

First off, Welcome to FIRST and Chief Delphi. I hope you guys have fun this year.

The reason Wind River is given to teams instead of another IDE such as Visual Studio for FRC use is due to the fact of the downloader. You are going to need to use Wind River to download your code, and it has some very good examples built into the WPI Lib, which is what we use to code FRC Robots in C++.

You can, in theory, do your code development in another IDE and copy and paste the code into Wind River when you need to download (I use this method to move code between my home PC and one of our 2 development laptops).

Instructions for downloading code to the robot via the Wind River IDE is part of the Getting Started with the 2012 Control System PDF.

[sjspry]

The reason WindRiver C++ is required is due to the cRIO possessing a different processor than your computer. Visual C++ from microsoft can only compile (by default) for an intel processor, while the cRIO is freescale-based.

While I am not sure if microsoft makes a suitable crosscompiler, as long as you are using windows it will be less of a hassle to install WindRiver.

[spacepenguine]

As sjspry said, the reason that they push WindRiver is because it includes the VxWorks cross compiler. You can actually upload compiled software to the cRio through the ftp interface (many teams use this to upload text files with configuration data). As far as I know, Visual Studio can't do the cross compiling that is required for the different processor/WindRiver embedded linux on the cRio.

On another note, WindRiver is not bad as an ide. It's actually built on Eclipse.

[davidthefat]

If your team does any kind of code management, you can actually develop in any IDE you want and push that code onto your repository and build it on your "dedicated" machine. That is what we are doing this year.

[jhersh]

Originally Posted by spacepenguine

As far as I know, Visual Studio can't do the cross compiling that is required for the different processor/WindRiver embedded linux on the cRio.

VxWorks is the operating system on the cRIO-FRC. It does not run embedded Linux.

[Ian McTavish]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

If your team does any kind of code management, you can actually develop in any IDE you want and push that code onto your repository and build it on your "dedicated" machine. That is what we are doing this year.

This seems like a great solution - I really appreciate everyone's comments. It saved some trial and error time!

[enrique]

If your doing this I recommend starting the project in winriver, then editing the created files in VS. I used to have a procedure on how to make VS compile for ppc by having it run the winriver command line compile commands, but I can't find it. I will look some more and see if I find it. If you did this, and maybe write a plug in to ftp to the crio, then you could use VS to edit and compile but not debug.