To Infinity and Beyond Teensy

[Chevelle]

I am a huge fan of the whole Teensy family. They have really helped me out on a personal and professional level. I have used them as the embedded controller for a wide variety of projects. Their power and capabilities at these price points have dramatically reduced my development time and costs. I will continue to do prototyping with these devices but it is time to consider what to do for things at the next level. By the next level I mean boards that do not have full Teensies on them but just what is needed for the application.

For background, I use Visual Studio with the Visual Micro add-in for Arduino which of course includes Teensyduino. I really like this environment and would love to keep it.

Since prototype development would have been on the Teensy, it seems to make sense to stay with the NXP family but that isn't fixed in stone. So here are my questions...

1. Should I stay with the NXP family of devices? If not, care to offer an alternative?
2. Can I continue to use Visual Studio/Arduino/Visual Micro as the IDE? If not, which one?
3. Is there a straightforward programmer/debugger available? (It sure is nice to have the USB/serial connection for debug statements.)

This uncharted territory for me so I may not be asking all the right questions. Feel free to offer answers to questions I haven't asked.

Thanks.