Once a product family and development board have been decided upon the following three steps will get the project up and running with Microchip’s software development tools: download the free MPLAB IDE which works with all of our products; select a debugger and programmer that meets the user’s needs, from the low cost PICkit3 to the very popular ICD3 or the full featured Real ICE for advanced emulation; lastly, if customers want to develop code in C, use the available free C compilers. For additional information on software development tools and general and application specific development boards, please visit www.microchip.com/tools.