We’re two days from shipping so I thought I would get a realistic response now.
What programming environment did you use this year? Did you change during the season? If you changed why?
I used MPLAB all the way through, but I saw a few freaky things when I was using it (I’d be typing and gibberish would appear after the cursor as I was typing…a bit scary). Also, I’m thinking of switching to an Ubuntu-WinXP dual boot for next year, and that would interfere with the idea of using MPLAB again. I think I’ll use an alternative method; I know there’s something better out there.
JBot
I did prototyping in vi with gcc, and then brought it into MPLab to use the Microchip compiler. A fellow team member who uses Ubuntu was developing our compass interface code on a PIC16 used the free BoostC compiler with the SourceBoost IDE, but ended up having to use MPLab in VMWare to flash the chip with an ICD2 anyway.
Eclipse.
I was planning to use Eclipse this year but never got around to setting it up on my new laptop, so i just used MPLAB cause it was run the installer CD and I was done, next year I will be using vi on our coproccessor and gcc or a python interpreter. I will also likely use Eclipse for whatever C code I write first as I have to have the standard drive code done b4 my team lets me play with the fun stuff 
Maybe next year, I can get CDs in all the kits. (I’ll need lots of help!)
FIRSTclipse doesn’t need 1400 CDs, but you do need a click-n-go installer available for download from SF that just plain works. I spent the better part of a day after school getting it to work on my machine, the trick ended up being specifing the library files w/o spaces (eg. C:\EXAMPL~1\E-PATH~1\IN-OLD-F~1\ORMAT~1\FRC_AL~1.LIB). Eclipse and the MCC18 tools also didn’t play well at first with Subversion (Clean->Build All deleted some .svn directories and corrupted a repo I had going when I tried to commit the .hex files, luckily I was only 3 revs in from the default code). There were other issues as well, lots of tweaking paths-especially under Linker Information-and fiddling with MinGW make (which does work). It’s just not as convienent as MPLAB.
However, I haven’t run MPLAB since April of last year. Refactoring support, a quick diff viewer, and autocomplete are addictive, as is Ctrl+F3.
Other than that, I usually prototype with Dev-C++ when doing quirky C things like function pointers and Zend Studio 5.2 when just playing with program logic.
Robinson Levin
We used Code::Blocks, as well as just simple text-editing stuff.
We used a windows port of Vim, along with ctags. The project was built with MPLAB.
If anyone wants a good vimrc, let me know!
hehe… This happened to me as well, but that is because one of the freshmen decided to turn our Qwerty keyboard into a Dvorak. Real funny…:eek:
We also used Code::Blocks
We used an odd combination of KScope (GREAT program), emacs, and bluefish in combination with a Makefile. It worked very well, and we also utilized a subversion repository which really helped (revision 32 as of ship, we would’ve been at ~50 or more if we started it right at kickoff).
This is going to shock a few people, but none of the above. We have yet to push the program button on the 2007 RC; it’s all running on default code. Some of that might change come Palmetto; for the amount of stuff we’re doing to the code (read: not much), I expect to use MPLAB.
I used SlickEdit for all of my code writing. It has an interface I am used to (use it all the time at work) and some way cool features, most powerful of which is a project wide search feature.
It does also NOT have some of the goofy window placement issues I had with MPLAB.
Naturally, still use MPLAB to compile the code.
For those of you who used Code::Blocks, did you compile directly with the mcc compiler? or did you just use it to edit code…