Best AVR development environment? (windows)

[Rigby]

regression testing can lead to lazy testing, reliance on the automation, and false faith in the automated testing results.

If you have good devs who keep up on their test cases and/or test coverage statistics which show you what you're NOT testing, then it's actually not too bad.  I've used tools where the test cases measured the amount of code that was tested, and any code that was meant for production that wasn't run in a test case was flagged as not-tested.

[westfw]

I believe he's saying that his cluster of high-end linux systems is able to automatically do things in parallel and quickly, that in a typical individual PC based environment take a lot of manual effort (and time) to accomplish.  And that therefore, his company would be very foolish to give up those linux systems just because a vendor thinks that a windows-only tool is better.

What's unsaid (and isn't really relevant) is this is probably due to some linux wizard having set this up.  Using linux doesn't automatically get you such improvements, and using windows doesn't mean that you couldn't do similar things given (perhaps) an equivalent windows wizard.  Meanwhile, he's ahead of his competitor and not inclined to change, just to get the bells and whistles of VS.

The Arduino's "use external editor" feature works really nicely, for such a simple implementation, BTW.  Whenever I need heavy editing features, I turn it on and use EMACS for editing my "sketch", with the Arduino IDE reduced to a one-click build/upload tool...

[granz]

I guess I'm late to the game.  But I'll add another +1 to Atmel Studio V6.  As mentioned by mojo, the auto-completion feature is what makes it the most valuable in my opinion.  Also, if you've worked with Visual Studio in the past the learning curve is almost non-existent.

I'm not biased against traditional command line tools--I still use a command line build environment for Linux driver development, something I am responsible for at my company.  I just find that when I haven't worked on something for a while, I tend to forget whats-what.  Atmel Studio / Visual Studio completely helps you out with intellisense (auto-complete).

It's also important to note that there's no reason you can't just take your code files to another dev environment later on if you change your mind.

[G0HZU]

I'm not biased against traditional command line tools--I still use a command line build environment for Linux driver development, something I am responsible for at my company.  I just find that when I haven't worked on something for a while, I tend to forget whats-what.

I agree that it is easy to forget the commands etc. What I do here is add the series of relevant command lines as comments at the top of the assy file for future reference.

I used to do everything with a batch file so I just typed a single letter and then pressed return to generate the hex file, program the fuses and program and verify the device and also run the program. All from a single keystroke + a carriage return.
If any stage failed then it warned me onscreen.

[granz]

I'm not biased against traditional command line tools--I still use a command line build environment for Linux driver development, something I am responsible for at my company.  I just find that when I haven't worked on something for a while, I tend to forget whats-what.

I agree that it is easy to forget the commands etc. What I do here is add the series of relevant command lines as comments at the top of the assy file for future reference.

I used to do everything with a batch file so I just typed a single letter and then pressed return to generate the hex file, program the fuses and program and verify the device and also run the program. All from a single keystroke + a carriage return.
If any stage failed then it warned me onscreen.

I was actually referring to auto-complete ("intellisense" in VS) in the source editor for functions, structure members etc, constants. etc.  In the Linux world I still use makefiles + scripts for the reason you mention.

[zapta]

Your regression suite is fine if you managed to think of every possible configuration and every possible failure mode, ...

Same goes to non automated tests. Testing is a tricky thing. One way to address it, when possible, is a controlled ramped up release, this way you get feedback from the field before effecting all users.

BTW, worked once with a testing guru. He used to emphasize that testing does not creates quality, it just measures it.