programming IDE

Dear programmers

I'm a year 1 TIE (technical information engineering) student so I thought I'd start a complex project to get more indepth with everything I learn at the university.

Later I came across this robot and thought it would be awsome to try and build this myself

so I went and orderd some components.

3 mini stepper motors
3 mini servo's
a mega2560
and some other random motors wires and what not.

My goal is to start by building 1 leg and then go on building the whole robot.

So now I was wondering if you guys can help me with some tips because im pretty mutch a beginner here.
For example I'm not very happy with the sketch IDE of Arduino is there a way for me to build my projects in a visual studio kind of IDE? are there other things I need to know?

I do have a long programming background but embedded programming is very new for me so any tips will help.

thank you all in advance and excuse me please if I made any english errors

blueheart:
So now I was wondering if you guys can help me with some tips because im pretty mutch a beginner here.
For example I'm not very happy with the sketch IDE of Arduino is there a way for me to build my projects in a visual studio kind of IDE? are there other things I need to know?

I do have a long programming background but embedded programming is very new for me so any tips will help.

Start with the FAQ. Search for "IDE" and you will see two relevant starting points. Digest that and then come back here with follow-up questions.

There's a free plug-in for Visual Studio called Visual Micro. It gives the full functionality of the Arduino IDE to Visual Studio. Google it.

Or perhaps AVR Studio from Atmel.

I'm a hardware guy, I'm happy working in the IDE.

thank you guys for your response

I have been away for a while but now that I'm back I tryed to install AVRDUDE on atmel studio 6 to upload my code with it
I did this by following this tutorial http://www.jayconsystems.com/tutorial_detail.php?tid=7

unfortunately I keep getting this error when i run the serial program

avrdude.exe: ser_open(): can't open device ".COM1": The system cannot find the file specified.

I double checked my COM port and changed the number aswell it doe work on the arduino IDE but not in atmel studio.

Did I mis something?

Hey blueheart, Jay here from jayconsystems.
Have you already solved your problem?

The only thing that comes to mind is that you may have an extra "." before the "COM1"
Hope that helps!

Jay