Visual Studio vs. Atmel Studio

[pyronaught]

In Visual Studio, any code that has been excluded using conditional defines will be greyed out and optionally hidden so that you don't have to look at code that doesn't apply to your current configuration. In a project that makes such extensive use of conditional compiling such as this MultiWii code does, this is a very useful thing to have.

Currently I'm coding using Atmel Studio 6.2 with the Visual Micro plugin for Arduino and the above feature does not appear to be present. Is this something that can be turned on, or if I switched over to Visual Studio with the Visual Micro plugin will I gain that functionality? I just went with Atmel Studio because I figured it might have some AVR specific features in it that Visual Studio wouldn't have. Any opinions on which of these two platforms is best for working on MultiWii?

[QuadBow]

Well, I personally prefer Atlem Studio, since it is closer to embedded programming and I use it also without Arduino for Atmel AVR programming.

Formerly, there were two Visual Micro plugins, one for Atmel Studio, the other for Visual Studio.
But now, there is only one plugin and that one plugin provides the functionality for both - Atmel und Visual Studio.

I had not to turn anything on. But, of course you have to install Arduino software of the appropriate version firstly.

[pyronaught]

I've been using Visual Micro on Atmel Studio without any problems, I just miss the feature where code that doesn't get compiled is color coded. I do see where defines are color coded to indicate if they have been defined or not, but it also flags conditional defines as being defined even when the condition is not met so it's kind of worthless. For example:

#if defined( NEVER_DEFINED )
#define SOME_FLAG
#endif

Then SOME_FLAG is color coded throughout the program as being defined even though it never was. The editor just looks for the #define keyword without checking any conditions that surround it. This makes the color coding an unreliable way to know if something has been defined or not.