ROS Framework Installation and Examples

Question

what program do I use to program with the ROS framework, could I potentially use Visual Studio?

I am new to ROS and any tutorials or tutorial programs would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The most common IDE used for ROS development is Eclipse. More information is on the IDEs page on the ROS Wiki: http://www.ros.org/wiki/IDEs

If you follow the ROS tutorials you will see that ROS is merely programming in C or python, and therefore any IDE for these languages will be suitable.

Answer 2

Qt Creator can also be a good choice for C++. It has native support for CMake so there is no need for additional plug-ins or similar stuff. Just open a CMakeLists.txt file, choose a build directory in some place you don't mind (you will be using rosmake after all), run CMake and you're good to go. Autocomplete and refactoring work. Just make sure you run qtcreator from a terminal so it gets the ROS specific environment variables.