Migrating from developing in Design Editor to Visual Studio?

[bsee1]

I have a very large ETO project currently built using the ETO Design Editor. I would like to begin using Visual Studio to develop it instead.  How would I go about this, and what information do you need to point me in the right direction?

Here's a general background of what it does

(I don't know if any of this impacts how I move development to Visual Studio)

The ETO project has several "stations" in it, and creates an image of all the stations together, then takes individual images from each.  Each station has parameters and information that goes with it that needs to be entered by the user.  This information is summarized, then used to create various quote documents in Microsoft Word(and eventually Excel).

At the moment I'm just *assuming* developing an ETO project in Visual Studio is better.  What actual benefits does Visual Studio provide over the Design Editor?

[Lesoux]

Don't do it in the meantime. Because the Visual Studio is too "raw". And doesn't support some features that you can use in the Design Editor. I begun to work with Visual Studio after installing v5.1 and came back to Design Editor in the current time. It's my point. Good luck!

[bsee1]

In that case, can you point me to any tutorials on simply using the Design Editor?  I can't seem to debug anything, use breakpoints, or do really anything that I'd expect an IDE to do.  When using prebuilt functions, the Design Editor only sometimes shows me what inputs the prebuilt function needs.  (For example, iv_saveImage)

I'm a programmer, and ETO seems like it is missing basic programming functions.  If any of these functions exist, could you tell me how, or point me to a tutorial that shows how?  Some of what I'm lookign for is basic, and I'd be shocked if they didn't have it.

[Lesoux]

You are absolutely right. However, Visual Studio doesn't support debugging, using breakpoints and so on in the meantime. You can correct code only.

[Lesoux]

I mean ETO Series Studio.

[FarrenYoung]

Yeah I would definitely advise against using eto studio with eto 2012.  IMO it's lacking a lot of the important features the standard inventor/eto design editor has.  The biggest pain in my ****/opinion is having to reload the designs after any code change in eto studio.  This is done by hovering mouse over model browser and right clicking, waiting a few moments for it to do something (not sure why but there is definitely a delay here) and when menu finally appears, clicking reload all.  If my hands are on the keyboard and I'm coding, I don't want to have to do all that just to quickly make a change, every single time I want to save.