I regularly use PIC microcontrollers. I’ve tried some Atmel chips lately but I’m still by far most familiar with the PIC16 & PIC18 chip families. As you can see in my other posts, I tend to use SMD components but once in a while I need to program a DIP package.
I do all my PIC programming using the MikroC for PIC compiler from Mikroelektronika. They also make this MikroProg programmer/debugger that integrates nicely into their IDE.
So these DIP sockets have a 5x 100 mil header that lets me connect the MikroProg and route the signals to the respective pins of the PIC. Obviously, different chips have different pin counts and pinouts so I had to make a few of them to cover all the PICs I use.