MPLAB® X IDE is designed to help you write, debug and release applications for embedded systems. However, your company may have requirements that make code development outside the IDE necessary.
You can build your code outside MPLAB X IDE following the instructions in this chapter. If you need to debug this code, you can import it into an MPLAB X IDE project. See "Prebuilt Projects" and “Loadable Projects, Files and Symbols” for more information.
Alternatively, you can compile your code with debug information and use the command-line Microchip Debugger (MDB), which comes with each version of MPLAB X IDE, to debug your code. For more on MDB, see the "Microchip Debugger (MDB) User’s Guide" (DS50002102), found in the <MPLAB X IDE installation>/docs directory.