FAQs for Getting Started

Yes

The following questions were answered during an online training. Hopefully, this is useful to new users.

Question	Answer
Can the extension be installed over previous installations? Do you need to uninstall before downloading? Are there known issues if not done this way?	If the installed extension version is newer than 0.9 (first marketplace version), there is not need to erase before, can be installed over. If you had a pre-release extension version (so the ones installed as vsix before) you have to uninstall first, since the product ID was changed so you'll end up seeing a duplicated MCUXpresso for VSCode extension.
Does the extension provide peripheral and register views?	Both are available in the debug perspective. While the register view is populated by default, for Peripheral view the tool requires the location of the svd file in your repository. The extension handles this information in most cases. However, the svd file can be manually specified (its filepath) in the project -> .vscode -> launch.json -> "svdPath" : "<your_svd_filepath>"
Does the plugin include features for mcu-link pro, such as energy measurement? If not, is this in roadmap?	The current extension includes a view called Analysis. For now, it only supports loading Energy Measurement sample files generated in MCUXpresso IDE. Energy measurement within VS Code will be added in a future release.
Does the extension provide RTOS analysis tools ?	There already is an RTOS view provided by Embedded Tools extension. It becomes visible when going into debug mode.
When creating an SDK on MCUXpresso.nxp.com, do I need to create for a specific toolchain? MCUXpresso or GCC?	ARM GCC
In hello_world example, where is the startup.c and /drivers folder? There are a lot of files not shown in the Project Explorer	The files from the example itself are located in the Project folder. The other files from the SDK are linked to a virtual directory called _repo_ that you can see in the Project Explorer.
Do you need to reinstall SDKs already installed with MCUXpresso IDE?	If you have your repos locally, you can use the Import Repository -> Local, and you simply select the directory where the repo is on disk. Still, this is available if you have an SDK Git repo or a zip/standalone SDK created for multiple toolchains. This is because both these variants will work for armgcc toolchain which is the one used by VSCode. The only installation that won't work will be a standalone/zip SDK which was generated for MCUXpresso IDE only. Only supports versions v2.13.0 or greater.
In MCUXpresso when you compile a project you end up with a axf file but you can convert it to binary hex or srec with the binary utilites. Is there something similar here?	select executable file -> right click -> Binary Utilities
How can I know which debug probe is used?	You can check the DEBUG CONSOLE and you'll see connection details, once you connected. On the future versions, we plan to add some more descriptive information to see which probe is used by which project.
Is the external MCUXpresso installer required? Could those tools also be installed through the extensions of VScode?	No, not planned, the idea of MCUXpresso Installer (long term) is to provide an installation process for overall MCUXpresso ecosystem, not only for VSCode
When will the MCUXpresso IDE's "create a project" be available in the VScode plugin?	For now, the strategy is to start from SDK the available projects. You can then add/remove components or change various settings (floating point, debug console type, library type, and some other in the future) . For this: right click on the project -> Configure. The "create a project" as defined inside MCUXpresso IDE will be addressed in a future release.