Microcontrollers

My Background

I have successfully built an SWR/wattmeter that uses a PIC16F72 microcontroller. I used the PICSTART Plus programmer, MPLAB, and MPLAB SIM to program the PIC16F72 in Assembly language. I won't try to cover everything there is to know about microcontrollers. I'm only documenting my experience here.

My notes on C programming

There is MUCH less support for programming PIC microcontrollers in C than there is for programming them in Assembly language.
The ways to do C programming are:

PICC-LITE: It is included in MPLAB version 8.10. This makes it easier, because it no longer has to be installed separately.

Advantages: It's free and available in Windows.
Drawbacks: MPLAB is not available in Linux. The BIGGEST drawback is that PICC-LITE only works with certain microcontrollers.

SDCC: It requires GCC and GPUTILS.

Advantages: It's free and available in both Linux and Windows.
Drawbacks: I haven't been able to get it working so far due to NUMEROUS dependencies, such as gtkextra.