Particle Ships IoT Tool Based on Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine

Particle Ships IoT Tool Based on Visual Studio Code

By David Ramel
04/17/2019

Internet of Things specialist Particle has shipped a new development tool based on the ever-popular Visual Studio Code editor.

VS Code, the cross-platform, open source code editor that can function more as a full-fledged IDE with the help of numerous extensions, has been put to many uses during its climb in popularity that saw it named the most popular coding tool in the huge Stack Overflow developer survey.

In announcements yesterday, Microsoft and Particle revealed the brand-new Particle Workbench release based on VS Code. "Workbench adds Particle-specific integrations to help make you more productive," Particle said. "This is our most powerful, professional IoT development environment yet and starting today, it's now generally available with our custom, cross-platform Particle installer with support for Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and macOS."

Although it just hit general availability, the tooling was actually announced in preview last fall.

"Particle Workbench and Visual Studio Code are available together through a single, downloadable installer, which include the toolchains and extensions for Particle's IoT ecosystem, supporting local offline compilation and device programming, or cloud compilation and over-the-air (OTA) device programming," Microsoft said in its own announcement yesterday.

"IntelliSense for Particle Device APIs are provided by Visual Studio Code language services and the C/C++ extension," Microsoft continued. "Advanced hardware debugging is available in Visual Studio Code, for actions like setting breakpoints and step-through debugging, all pre-configured for Particle hardware. There's also access to more than 3,000 official and community Particle libraries, enabling more reusability and less typing."

In the required bullet list of features, Particle said functionality provided out-of-the-box includes:

Compile where you want: local or cloud
Stress-free toolchain management
Built-in version control and debugging
Flexible deployment: over-the-wire or over-the-air
Code complete with IntelliSense for Particle device libraries
Quick installation experience for Windows, Linux, and macOS

Interested developers can download Particle Workbench or read the documentation. The entire Particle hardware/software project is hosted on GitHub.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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