Development Environment Suggestions for Widget Development

[TheKenerson]

Hi,

     I'm new to writing widgets and I was looking for suggestions for Development Environments. Currently I use Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.

     I am mostly looking for debugging support at runtime.

     In the past, when I wrote simple web map applications in html and javascript, it was easy to debug using Visual Studio combined with internet explorer. However, when working with the widget project structure, running the debug in this manner is not effective.

      Looking for suggestions...

      Thank you.

[RobertScheitlin__GISP]

Kenerson,

   My personal choice is to use a JS IDE like Atom.io or Brackets.io and do debugging using Google Chrome Dev Tools. Actually this is how the majority of ESRI's JS API developers do it as well.

[MikeCrook]

Hi,

If you're a Microsoft Visual Studio junkie then Visual Studio Code is a good option too. It similar to Atom.io and its free from Microsoft. A huge plus for me was integrating a bash shell terminal instead of Windows powershell or command prompt. I use it for the bulk of my web development involving any JavaScript\TypeScript based libraries. I use Visual Studio 2017 for my ASP.NET MVC or Web API web projects.

Thanks

[KenBuja]

This isn't really covering the IDE question, but as a newcomer to widget development, you should be aware of some tools available from Esri to help in the process. Esri has built a generator that will scaffold out all the files you'll need for a widget and, using Grunt, can automatically update the files in your app as you built it.

GitHub - Esri/generator-esri-appbuilder-js: Yeoman generator to help customize Esri's WebAppBuilder 

I use VS2017 but use the Chrome dev tools for my debugging.