[69_years_and]

Yes it's a good thing (for the tinkerers of this world) and I suspect its a long term view for MS. If young tinkerers can tinker away on some of the cool hardware out there leveraging MS products/tools for free (in the same way they can using linux tools) then in the future maybe some of those young folk will bring to this world some awesome startups also using the MS tool chains, a chain they may well be prepared to exchange cash for - but certinally a chain they will be familiar with.

Of course those not happy with that can fork the Arduino and its tool's - as far as I know they are all open.

Of course it may lead nowhere MS and they may well drop it when the return does not pan out.

My 2 cents...

[mauricemir]

Yes given the relatively small amount of space on ardunio using VS to write code for them seems over kill.

[fnordfnordfnord]

Integrating the Arduino firmware with a Windows GUI app will be a lot easier if the firmware was generated from within MSVS. I could imagine automatically generated bindings to hardware functions. I can also imagine an automatic custom "device driver" generator; and then maybe an all-in-one installer roller thing. There are some pretty cool possibilities.