One of my main concerns for some time have been to find a free development kit that actually works for Raspberry PI. I intended to develop directly on the PI, but the drawback with that is that I need a 3rd screen + keyboard/mouse and I simply have no room for it as is. The other is that I have lost a few SD cards in earlier trials so I don’t want to save source on RPI. Cross Compilation will solve this.
Long story short – I have tools I use because I have no option and tools I prefer to use. Visual Studio and previously Visual C++ have been among my main preferences for years. It simply is one of the best IDEs available. With Microsoft releasing the community version it becomes free for people like me, and with the release of GDB support I can install an extension and use Visual Studio on my PC to work on Raspberry PI like any other embedded project. This is a major step forward in making it easy to develop C/C++ for Raspberry PI in my case. And best of all – you download, install it and it just works without any fuzz.
Using add-on’s like VisualGDB I can also move my STM32 development to Visual Studio and get both STM32, Raspberry PI, Android and Desk-top development under the same “rooth”. I noticed comments from Microsoft on their forum indicating that STM32 and other development will be included in Visual Studio – the note was 1 year old.