BELK-TN-009: Integrating Visual Studio Code with a cross-toolchain

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This technical note was validated against specific versions of hardware and software. What is described here may not work with other versions.

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0	June 2020	First public release

Introduction

This Technical Note (TN) shows how to integrate Visual Studio Code (VSC) and a cross-toolchain in order to

• cross-build a Makefile-based application
• capture errors generated by the cross-tools to edit erroneous lines easily.

Testbed

To test the procedure, the same testbed described here was used. Therefore, the application used to validate the procedure is freertos_hello_world. In any case, the configuration described here can be easily adapted to different use cases.

With regard to VSC, the following version was used:

Version: 1.41.1 (system setup)
Commit: 26076a4de974ead31f97692a0d32f90d735645c0
Date: 2019-12-18T14:58:56.166Z
Electron: 6.1.5
Chrome: 76.0.3809.146
Node.js: 12.4.0
V8: 7.6.303.31-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 6.1.7601

VSC/cross-toolchain integration

This example shows how to build the freertos_hello_world application and how to catch errors generated by the cross-toolchain in order to edit the erroneous source files accordingly.

As it was tested on a Windows PC, it requires Cygwin to work.

First, create a Default Build Task as described here. The tasks.json file should look like this:

{
    // See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
    // for the documentation about the tasks.json format
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "Cross build",
            "type": "shell",
            "command": "SET PATH=e:\\Xilinx\\SDK\\2019.1\bin\\;e:\\Xilinx\\SDK\\2019.1\\gnu\\aarch32\\nt\\gcc-arm-none-eabi\\bin\\;c:\\cygwin64\\bin\\;%PATH% && make",
            "options": {
                "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}/Debug"
            },
            "problemMatcher": "$gcc",
            "presentation": {
                "reveal": "always",
                "panel": "new"
            },
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            }
        }
    ]
}

By pressing 'Ctrl+Shift+B, the build process is started:

Starting the cross-building process

If there are syntax errors, Ctrl + Left click ...

The output of the cross-toolchain

... allows to jump to the erroneous line:

Catching the syntax error

This example makes use of the C/C++ extension. It is convenient to configure it so that it can access include files although they are outside the project's directory. By pressing Ctrl+Shift+P and selecting C/C++ Edit Configurations (JSON), it is possible to create a c_cpp_properties.json:

Catching the syntax error

Then, modify the includePath variable as shown in the following box:

{
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Win32",
            "includePath": [
                "${workspaceFolder}/**",
                "${workspaceFolder}/../freertos_hello_world_bsp/ps7_cortexa9_0/include"
            ],
            "defines": [
                "_DEBUG",
                "UNICODE",
                "_UNICODE"
            ],
            "cStandard": "c11",
            "intelliSenseMode": "msvc-x64"
        }
    ],
    "version": 4
}

After modifying includePath, no more issues are reported in the PROBLEMS window:

The output of the cross-toolchain

For more details, please see also this page.