MPLAB IDE vs PCW

[fonze]

Hello everybody,

My question is very simple :
what is the (dis)advantage of working with the PCW IDE instead of MPLAB ?

For now, I'm coding in C in MPLAB and the CCS C compiler seems to be well integrated. Does the CCS IDE (PCW) bring new possibilities or is it just the same ?

Does anyone have experienced both ?

Thanks,

Fonze

[Haplo]

I've used both and in my opinion PCW is much better. Not only it comes with a lot of useful tools, but also it has a better debugger. Under MPLAB you have to press the 'step' key over each C statement many times to execute it (because each step only executes one assembly instruction, and each C statement is made of many), but PCW works like a proper C debugger. PCW allows you to watch all the variable types such as arrays, strings, floats,... which all would be a hassle under MPLAB. And also, holding the mouse cursor over a variable shows its value. If you have PCW you can use CCS ICD which works much better than Microchip ICD. The 'New Project Wizard' is very helpful. The list goes on...you can see some of the other benefits here:

http://www.ccsinfo.com/pcwide.shtml

[valemike]

To add onto what Haplo said, I also experience that the MPLAB IDE does not interpret any variable above 8 bits long correctly (e.g. floats). I hardly use my personally-owned ICD-U here at work because I am supplied with plenty of Microchip's ICDs.

To get around the MPLAB IDE problem not interpreting variable Watches, I just do a printf (assuming there is MAX232 circuitry) on your development board.

Honestly, I find printf() 100x more useful than breakpoints!

Without printf(), a person can scratch his/her head for days. That is why I prefer to develop most of my program on a PICDEM2+ board before running it on the actual hardware. To develop the actual hardware with the luxury of debuggability adds a few bucks, so I usually get prototypes from the hw guys that I can't debug unless I use an ICE2000. And even an ICE2000 will cost $450 for every chip you try to emulate.