This is an old post, preserved for reference.
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After many years programming microprocessors like the Z80, the 6502 and the 68K back in the 80's, I first met the microcontroller in the form of the PIC16C84 in the mid 90's. I built a homemade parallel port programmer and away I went. Since then I've used various PIC's in personal and commercial projects, initially in assembler, and later in C. It's the usual story of 'which microcontroller should I use?', and well, there's a bunch of PIC's in the box, the official programmer, home made prototyping boards, the IDE is setup and working and I know my way around them. So, as long as there is a PIC variant that has the requisite features, it's the easy (read 'lazy') choice. However, a couple of years ago, I had a couple of ideas for projects using USB, so I got some PIC's with USB support and built some prototypes. These never went anywhere, there seemed to be loads of problems, the USB framework seemed to be in a state of flux, so the examples were based on a different version to the current one, the latest version didn't work with the IDE, there were incompatibilities with the core framework, and when it did compile, it didn't work! I spent ages with various libraries and versions of MPLAB and a couple of different types of PIC and got nowhere, so they were put on the shelf.
