Oh don't get me wrong, the people at microchip are superb, especially when something "interesting" catches my eye; I drop our account manager an email and say "I'd like to try out something with " and they send me one or two in the post, or drop it into the office. But I gues= s that's the benefit of using 1m parts a year. Our main issue here is that we have to stay with MPLAB v8.83 and Hitech C v9.65 for our legacy products. I use MPLABX and XC8/XC16 for new projects.= =20 X 1.62 is much more stable than the old 8.83 but the debugger still has som= e strange issues - reporting one value when it's clearly some other value - (output something to serial to check values - yep different to the debugger!)=20 I quite like the Visual Studio environment, having got to grips with it fro= m an early version and now on 2010 for C# windows stuff. (I know 2012 is out, but I try not to be bleeding edge). I am happy to throw PC performance and money at development tools if they work well.=20 James says (and I paraphrased this) that he gets trolled on here sometimes; that's true of the whole internet I'm afraid.=20 Official forums, I don't really want to get started on that, but I posted a query for a colleague about USB, back in August I think it was, and had no replies. I was looking for a similar issue recently and googled it, one of the responses was my own solitary post on their forums. (I would have expected at least a funny/sarcastic response from DarioG!) -Jim -----Original Message----- From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf Of Xiaofan Chen Sent: 22 March 2013 06:57 To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. Subject: Re: [PIC] Resource/Tutorial for MPLAB X, XC8, and XC16 On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:36 AM, Jim Franklin wrote= : > Unfortunately, if the pages listed below are anything like the rest of th= e > Microchip documentation I have had to use, he'd be better reading a comic > book. The MC docs can be fuzzy, misleading and in places self-contradicting. > > I still love the chips themselves, just not the documents, or the IDE or the > compilers! The compilers are pretty decent actually. The MPLAB X IDE seems be under active development and gets better. The older MPLAB IDE has gone through similar process (bad in the 5.x days, usable under 6.x/7.x days, quite usable under the 8.x days). > One thing James has done correctly is to ignore the official forums and come > straight here, where he will get answers. I will not say this is really correct. Microchip forum is pretty good and in general better than PIClist when it comes to specific PIC related questions. PIClist of course has its niche as well. > -Disgruntled PIC user, considering moving to Atmel as their IDE is more > stable. Hmm, many people say that the newer Atmel Studio 5/6 is slow, bloated and not stable. It is based on Microsoft Visual Studio Shell 2010 which requires better PC and more RAMs to run. --=20 Xiaofan --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .