Is it possible to make a BeagleBone Black app on Visual Studio without VisualGDB?

Question

We are currently doing a minor for our study where we need to be able to connect a screen to a BeagleBone Black. The goal is to recreate a gameboy. We currently flashed the latest version of Debian on it, which is Debian 8.4 . The (mandatory) requirements of our project are:

• It is required to use Visual Studio for further development, because other students will also use our project.

• We can use any language , but it is preferred for us to use C++.

• We can't use VisualGDB , because school does not fund this and the free trial lasts 30 days, while our teacher expects to be working on this project with other students for at least a few years.

We have already tried:

• Creating a Node.js application that we can debug through Visual Studio with this tutorial . With this method we are limited to one language and we can't use C++. We can not debug the code immediately, since we need to transfer the files to the BeagleBone first and then debug it.
• Using Windows CE 7 image from Codeplex. We got this recommendation from our teacher, but we do not know how to proceed any further and connect Visual Studio on this way.

We see a lot of tutorials on the internet for our issue that require to download VisualGDB. Is there any other way to continue this assignment?

Answer 1

VisualGDB is obsolete since Visual Studio 2015. It is possible to cross-compile via a free addon: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/725025cf-7067-45c2-8d01-1e0fd359ae6e

This will give you the full benefit of writing your C++ code in Visual Studio and still deploy to a Linux based machine.

More information about the use of the addon: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/03/30/visual-c-for-linux-development/

Sounds like a cool project, good luck with it!