Welcome View

The Welcome View is one of the default Sidebar Views. This View contains several options to help you get started with creating your application, including several options for quickly adding or creating new applications.

Welcome page

When you first install the extension, the Welcome to nRF Connect page will open in the Editor area.

This page will appear each time you open VS Code as long as you have selected the Show welcome page on startup checkbox on the page (selected by default). You can later open the page by clicking the Open welcome page option in the Welcome View.

Quick Setup section

This area is critical for configuring the extension settings. Here is where you set the nRF Connect SDK and nRF Connect Toolchain versions that are required for your application to work correctly.

Open an existing application

This option (and the corresponding Open Application option in the Applications View) opens the Select Folder window, in which you can select the directory of the application that you want to build and test from the nRF Connect SDK tree without making any changes of your own. For example, this can be one of the samples provided with the nRF Connect SDK that are run out of the box with their basic configuration. You can also use this option to open an application obtained from different sources. For example, this could be an nRF Connect SDK application that you worked on in a different IDE, such as SEGGER Embedded Studio Nordic Edition, or an application created by someone else who shares it with you from their fork.

Note

Opening an application directly from the nRF Connect SDK tree is not recommended since this can pollute and change the nRF Connect SDK sources.

Create a new application

Use this option when you want to test an application out of the box or you are starting your own project and want to develop an application based on an existing sample. This option creates a local version of the application from a template.

Clicking Create a new application opens the New Application page, described below. For the detailed steps, see How to build an application from the nRF Connect SDK page.

New Application page

The New Application page lets you create a new application from a template and customize some of its settings.

See the tooltips on the page for more information about each field. For more information about the available application types, see the Applications page.

Clicking the Create Application button at the bottom of the page creates the application and adds it to the Applications View in the Sidebar.

nRF Connect SDK

This field specifies the nRF Connect SDK version for your freestanding application.

By default, the nRF Connect SDK is determined by the version you selected during setup. If you want to compile your application against a different version, choose it from the drop-down menu or click Install next to it to open the Toolchain Manager and install the desired version.

See Configuration scopes for more information on how your environment is affected by configuration scopes.

nRF Connect Toolchain

This field specifies the Toolchain version for use with your application, regardless of the application type.

The Toolchain is a set of tools that are required for the development with the nRF Connect SDK, including west, CMake, GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain, and others.

Application template

The Application template field lets you access the list of available samples and applications and the Sample Browser.

Application detection

The extension scans for applications in all the west modules in the manifest and automatically adds them to the Application template list.

If you want to have your application appear in the list, make sure it meets the following requirements:

• The application must have a sample.yaml file.
• The application must be located in either the samples or applications folder of your module in the SDK. The extension looks for the pattern ${topdir}/**/(applications|samples)/**/sample.yaml.
• The sample.yaml file must not be deeper than 8 levels from ${topdir}.

Sample Browser window

In Sample Browser, you can search for specific samples by typing the name into the search field, or filter the search parameters by clicking the filter icon.

In the right side of the window, the sample's documentation appears. You can use this preview to check the sample requirements or steps for testing.

When you have found the sample you want to use, you can click Select to confirm your selection.

Note

Some samples in the nRF Connect SDK are currently not designed to work out-of-tree. You may need to manually configure your sample to work correctly in the extension.

Create a new board

The Create a new board button opens the Create New Board screen to select the parameters of a custom board and use it as a build configuration. For more information, see How to add a custom board.

Visit documentation

The Visit documentation option opens the extension's main documentation site in your default browser.

Give feedback

The Give feedback option opens the Give Feedback form, which you can use to send feedback about the extension, including what you would like to see implemented in the future.

Note

This is not a way to get support with the nRF Connect SDK applications and related hardware. For support, visit the Nordic Semiconductor's DevZone.

Generate support information

The Generate support information option creates a log in the Output Panel View that you can copy and forward to the Nordic Semiconductor's DevZone to provide more context for an issue.

The log includes a set of information that can be useful for debugging the issue, including your platform and system details, nRF Connect and toolchain versions, and summary of environment settings. The data could contain sensitive or confidential information about your environment. If you do not wish this to be seen by others, make sure to remove it before sharing.