But happily I succeeded to compile and write bits of codes to the ESP8266 flash memory. The compile and upload options in User Settings were more complicated than those of Microsoft one. So, then I gave the Steve Yin’s Arduino extension a try on my Win 8.

But for some reasons, I still preferred to work on my Windows 8 machine. I could compile and upload codes to the ESP8266. For unknown reasons compiling sketch using VS Code was always fail with a message saying ‘ Exit with code=undefined’. Actually, I also had an Ubuntu machine, and I managed to get the Arduino extension working. Btw, my OS was Windows 8, and I installed the official Arduino IDE version 1.8.2. Then we need to specify the Arduino IDE path in the VS Code ‘User Settings’. So we must have the official Arduino IDE installed because its tools for compiling and uploading will be used by the VS Code. Well, Arduino extension is just an extension that allows users to tell the VS Code where the tools for compiling and uploading code reside. Initially I chose the one developed by Microsoft. If you search for the Arduino extension, you will find two choices, either developed by Microsoft or Steve Yin. Getting the VS Code with Arduino extension working was not that straight forward either. I spent quite some time to solve it but did not succeed, so I abandoned it and tried the Arduino extension. I suspected it was caused by my office internet proxy. Somehow the PlatformIO installation was not able to complete.

I had difficulties to get both Atom-PlatformIO and VS Code-PlatformIO working. While with VS Code, we need to install either PlatformIO or Arduino extension. With Atom, we need to add the PlatformIO extension for programming embedded systems, including the ESP8266. I find particularly two feature-rich IDEs out there, which are free and highly recommended by communities, namely Atom and Visual Studio Code. But recently I plan to write an application that I feel it would be uncomfortable to write codes using the limited features of Arduino IDE. So now I have used the official Arduino IDE for some time to program the ESP8266. It is a convenient and quick-to-get-started method (check here).

Visual studio code arduino