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I saw that VS 2015 supports native Android development.
What I was able to read on the matter suggested that they support apps that are completely natively built.
My team's app consists of a Java part and a native part, will VS be able to debug the c++ part when it is launched from Android studio/Eclipse with ADT? Or can VS run the whole thing?
Visual Studio can build and debug complete Android applications leveraging C++ and Java. Visual Studio Android development story also allows to debug already built applications (.apk's) in VS easily.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/07/20/what-s-new-with-visual-c-cross-platform-mobile-development.aspx
"•You can now debug an existing Android APK without the need to build from Visual Studio. This means you can use the powerful C++ debugging experience in Visual Studio without the need to migrate any source or build settings. To use this capability follow the steps below" section.
I think that you can only debug C++ using VS, also you have to build and start the app from VS because it adds some libs to the apk to debug it.
You are correct with VS2015 RTM android developers can only debug C++ code. With Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 RC Visual Studio will allow Android developers to debug both C++ and Java code. In addition to this we will also be launching a preview version of Java code-editing features (navigation, intellisense) We would love to hear your feedback, once you try out our Java debugging and language service experience.
You can reach us at vcmdd-admin#microsoft.com or follow us at
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/ if you have more questions.
In Visual Studio Community 2015 I'm trying to create a static library that would be shared between Android and Windows platform projects. I've successfully created the library project for Android platform and I'm using it without any problem.
Howerver, I can't seem to find a way how to add a Windows platform support for my library project!
It looks like for my currently created android static library project (called "Engine") a "<New...>" option is missing in the selection box!?
EDIT: I've created my library as a Visual C++ - Cross Platform - Static library (Android) in a hope that I will be able to add the C++ Windows x86 and x64 platform support later on. But now I'm struggling to find a way to do that.
Is there any way I can use a single project for Android and Windows platforms? (Like i.e. using x86 and x64 for Windows...)
Ok, looks like it's not possible to have a single C++ project configurable for multiple platforms (like i.e. for android and windows platforms)
After doing some research I've noticed that there is a nice way to share the same source code between multiple project in a bit similar ways as if using the static library!
This suits for me perfectly because I have some "common" things that I want my Android and Windows platform projects to share.
Then to i.e. you Windows or Android project properties menu.
Click "Add" -> "Reference..."
In the "Add Reference" window go to "Shared Projects" and select your desired "sharable" project.
That's it!
I wonder if there is any difference between using the Android Studio, Google offer to use, and use the IntelliJ Base IDE, and install the Android plugin?
Would it effect the project and module handling?
Would it effect facets?
I've been using IntelliJ IDEA 12 for Android projects for a long time. Android studio has a lot of beneficial additional Android integration, such as:
Inline Lint API checks
Drawable and string previews
Better layout editor
Built in Gradle support
Better DDMS integration
But you can certainly just use the community edition of IntelliJ 12 for Android projects, and for production projects, I would say it's preferable at this time until Android Studio stabilizes. Also, I believe IntelliJ 13 will essentially include all of the Android functionality that Android Studio does, from what I've heard.
This is useful FAQs about Android Studio vs Android Plugin in IntelliJ IDEA.
It is clear to me that
The EAP (Early Access Preview) of IntelliJ IDEA 13, which includes all of the Android Studio features except for the redesigned new project wizard and the App Engine cloud endpoints integration, is available now.
http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-and-android-studio-faq/
As of today, Android studio actually functions, so I guess this would be my immediate solution. plus I'm not even sure the Android plugin would support all the features as Android studio will, and that there would not be any conflicts... better safe then sorry.
Can you use Visual Studio for Android Development?
If so how would you set the android SDK instead of .NET framework and are there any special settings or configuration?
Yes, you can use Visual Studio for Android (native) using "vs-android".
Here are the steps to set it up:
Download the Android SDK here.
Download the Android NDK here.
Download Cygwin here.
Download the JDK here.
Download Visual Studio 2010, 2012 or 2013 here.
Download vs-android here.
Download Apache Ant here.
Set environment variables:
(Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables)
ANDROID_HOME = <install_path>\android-sdk
ANDROID_NDK_ROOT = <install_path>\android-ndk
ANT_HOME = <install_path>\apache-ant
JAVA_HOME = <install_path>\jdk
_JAVA_OPTIONS = -Xms256m -Xmx512m
Download examples from here.
It works like a charm... and best so far to use.
Yes you can:
http://www.gavpugh.com/2011/02/04/vs-android-developing-for-android-in-visual-studio/
In case you get "Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar" you can add an environment variable JAVA_HOME that points to your Java JDK path, for example c:\sdks\glassfish3\jdk (restart MSVC afterwards)
An even better solution is using WinGDB Mobile Edition in Visual Studio: it lets you create and debug Android projects all inside Visual Studio:
http://ian-ni-lewis.blogspot.com/2011/01/its-like-coming-home-again.html
Download WinGDC for Android from
http://www.wingdb.com/wgMobileEdition.htm
Believe me, I've tried so hard to find a decent IDE for Android developement but I failed. I used Visual Studio for many years, and it is so hard for me to get use to the way Eclipse doing things.
However, the new IntelliJ supports for Android development, it's the closest you can get.
From the Android documentation:
The recommended way to develop an Android application is to use Eclipse with the ADT plugin... However, if you'd rather develop your application in another IDE, such as IntelliJ, or in a basic editor, such as Emacs, you can do that instead.
Currently, there are plug-ins for IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans, but you can still use the tools in /tools to build, debug, monitor, measure and start the emulator.
Much has changed since this question was asked. Visual Studio 2013 with update 4 and Visual Studio 2015 now have integrated tools for Apache Cordova and you can run them on a Visual Studio emulator for Android.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 now has options for Android development: C++, Cordova, and C# with Xamarin. When choosing one of those Android development options, Visual Studio will also install the brand new Visual Studio Emulator for Android to use as a target for debugging your app. You can also download the emulator without needing to install Visual Studio. For more details see
Visuals Studio 2015
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-downloads-vs
Visual Studio Emulator
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emulator-vs.aspx
Video of features https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Visual-Studio-2015-Final-Release-Event/Visual-Studio-Emulator-for-Android
Java Extension for Visuals Studio 2012, 2013. 2015
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bc561769-36ff-4a40-9504-e266e8706f93
That depends on what you actually want to achieve.
You want to keep on making normal Java-based Android application, but use Visual Studio for development? Then it's bad news, as Visual Studio has no built-in java support. Thus, if you use it out-of-the-box, you will lose all Java-specific Eclipse functionality (IntelliSense for Java, Java debugger, wizards, etc) as well as numerous Android plugins (that are Eclipse-specific and won't work with VS).
On the other hand, you can use Mono for Android to develop apps in C# in VS, but they won't look as smooth as the native apps (some functionality might be missing, look-and-feel slightly different, etc.). In that case such app could sell less than a "normal" Java app that looks and feels like all other Java apps.
If you are talking about native Android code (in C/C++), such as games, the news are not as bad. As Visual Studio has no problem with C++, there are numerous ways to make it work:
If you only want to compile your code, you can use the free vs-android toolset. It's essentially a set of build rules telling Visual Studio how to launch Android compiler.
If you want to compile and debug your native code with Visual Studio, you will need something more advanced, such as VisualGDB for Android. It can build/debug your Native code independently, or together with debugging Java code from Eclipse.
I know this q is quite old but it might me useful:
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2013/02/nvidia-introduces-nsight-tegra-to-assist-android-developers/
Besides, you can use VS for Android development too, because in the end, the IDE is nothing but a fancy text editor with shortcuts to command line tools, so most popular IDE's can be used.
However, if you want to develop fully native without restrictions, you'll have all kinds of issues, such as those related to file system case insensitivity and missing libraries on Windows platform..
If you try to build windows mobile apps on Linux platform, you'll have bigger problems than other way around, but still makes most sense to use Linux with Eclipse for Android OS.
You can use Visual Studio for Android Development. See a nice article on it here
I suppose you can open Java files in Visual Studio and just use the command line tools directly. I don't think you'd get syntax highlighting or autocompletion though.
Eclipse is really not all that different from Visual Studio, and there are a lot of tools that are designed to make Android development more comfortable that work from within Eclipse.
You can Build rich native apps using C# and Xamarin with 100% of the native APIs exposed to you. Or push maximum performance using C++ with code that could be reused with iOS or Windows.
To follow along you’ll need a copy of Visual Studio, plus the ‘Mobile development with .NET’ workload. You can either enable this feature from first installation of Visual Studio or access it from the ‘Tools -> Get Tools and Features…’ menu item:
Visual Studio Installer
When testing and running your app you have the choice of doing so with either an Android emulator running on your development machine, or by directly connecting to an existing Android device. There’s no right option here and different developers prefer different form factors. If you choose the former option, you’ll need to ensure once you’ve selected the workload that on the right-hand pane (‘Installation details’) the checkboxes for Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager and Google Android Emulator are selected (as seen above).
This article will help you to do basic android application through visual studio. I'll put the link here below down.
https://developer.okta.com/blog/2018/12/27/build-a-basic-android-app-with-xamarin-and-visual-studio
If you want to create an Android application using c# language you can use Xamarin.
they created this great Cross Platform development tool which enables developers to develop iOS and Android apps in C# language.
Xamarin is offered in different licenses from free to enterprise levels but for not I will be using the starter version which is the free version. It includes the Xamarin Studio which is great start for those who want to try out creating their first apps for Android, they also offer a Business license which lets you develop in Visual Studio so you can use that rich experience similar to developing Web Apps or Windows Apps, then they have this Enterprise which contains everything
You can use Visual Studio 2015 to building cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, and Windows.
IDE: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-US/explore/cordova-vs
Hope this will help!
Can you use Visual Studio for Android Development?
If so how would you set the android SDK instead of .NET framework and are there any special settings or configuration?
Yes, you can use Visual Studio for Android (native) using "vs-android".
Here are the steps to set it up:
Download the Android SDK here.
Download the Android NDK here.
Download Cygwin here.
Download the JDK here.
Download Visual Studio 2010, 2012 or 2013 here.
Download vs-android here.
Download Apache Ant here.
Set environment variables:
(Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables)
ANDROID_HOME = <install_path>\android-sdk
ANDROID_NDK_ROOT = <install_path>\android-ndk
ANT_HOME = <install_path>\apache-ant
JAVA_HOME = <install_path>\jdk
_JAVA_OPTIONS = -Xms256m -Xmx512m
Download examples from here.
It works like a charm... and best so far to use.
Yes you can:
http://www.gavpugh.com/2011/02/04/vs-android-developing-for-android-in-visual-studio/
In case you get "Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar" you can add an environment variable JAVA_HOME that points to your Java JDK path, for example c:\sdks\glassfish3\jdk (restart MSVC afterwards)
An even better solution is using WinGDB Mobile Edition in Visual Studio: it lets you create and debug Android projects all inside Visual Studio:
http://ian-ni-lewis.blogspot.com/2011/01/its-like-coming-home-again.html
Download WinGDC for Android from
http://www.wingdb.com/wgMobileEdition.htm
Believe me, I've tried so hard to find a decent IDE for Android developement but I failed. I used Visual Studio for many years, and it is so hard for me to get use to the way Eclipse doing things.
However, the new IntelliJ supports for Android development, it's the closest you can get.
From the Android documentation:
The recommended way to develop an Android application is to use Eclipse with the ADT plugin... However, if you'd rather develop your application in another IDE, such as IntelliJ, or in a basic editor, such as Emacs, you can do that instead.
Currently, there are plug-ins for IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans, but you can still use the tools in /tools to build, debug, monitor, measure and start the emulator.
Much has changed since this question was asked. Visual Studio 2013 with update 4 and Visual Studio 2015 now have integrated tools for Apache Cordova and you can run them on a Visual Studio emulator for Android.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 now has options for Android development: C++, Cordova, and C# with Xamarin. When choosing one of those Android development options, Visual Studio will also install the brand new Visual Studio Emulator for Android to use as a target for debugging your app. You can also download the emulator without needing to install Visual Studio. For more details see
Visuals Studio 2015
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-downloads-vs
Visual Studio Emulator
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emulator-vs.aspx
Video of features https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Visual-Studio-2015-Final-Release-Event/Visual-Studio-Emulator-for-Android
Java Extension for Visuals Studio 2012, 2013. 2015
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bc561769-36ff-4a40-9504-e266e8706f93
That depends on what you actually want to achieve.
You want to keep on making normal Java-based Android application, but use Visual Studio for development? Then it's bad news, as Visual Studio has no built-in java support. Thus, if you use it out-of-the-box, you will lose all Java-specific Eclipse functionality (IntelliSense for Java, Java debugger, wizards, etc) as well as numerous Android plugins (that are Eclipse-specific and won't work with VS).
On the other hand, you can use Mono for Android to develop apps in C# in VS, but they won't look as smooth as the native apps (some functionality might be missing, look-and-feel slightly different, etc.). In that case such app could sell less than a "normal" Java app that looks and feels like all other Java apps.
If you are talking about native Android code (in C/C++), such as games, the news are not as bad. As Visual Studio has no problem with C++, there are numerous ways to make it work:
If you only want to compile your code, you can use the free vs-android toolset. It's essentially a set of build rules telling Visual Studio how to launch Android compiler.
If you want to compile and debug your native code with Visual Studio, you will need something more advanced, such as VisualGDB for Android. It can build/debug your Native code independently, or together with debugging Java code from Eclipse.
I know this q is quite old but it might me useful:
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2013/02/nvidia-introduces-nsight-tegra-to-assist-android-developers/
Besides, you can use VS for Android development too, because in the end, the IDE is nothing but a fancy text editor with shortcuts to command line tools, so most popular IDE's can be used.
However, if you want to develop fully native without restrictions, you'll have all kinds of issues, such as those related to file system case insensitivity and missing libraries on Windows platform..
If you try to build windows mobile apps on Linux platform, you'll have bigger problems than other way around, but still makes most sense to use Linux with Eclipse for Android OS.
You can use Visual Studio for Android Development. See a nice article on it here
I suppose you can open Java files in Visual Studio and just use the command line tools directly. I don't think you'd get syntax highlighting or autocompletion though.
Eclipse is really not all that different from Visual Studio, and there are a lot of tools that are designed to make Android development more comfortable that work from within Eclipse.
You can Build rich native apps using C# and Xamarin with 100% of the native APIs exposed to you. Or push maximum performance using C++ with code that could be reused with iOS or Windows.
To follow along you’ll need a copy of Visual Studio, plus the ‘Mobile development with .NET’ workload. You can either enable this feature from first installation of Visual Studio or access it from the ‘Tools -> Get Tools and Features…’ menu item:
Visual Studio Installer
When testing and running your app you have the choice of doing so with either an Android emulator running on your development machine, or by directly connecting to an existing Android device. There’s no right option here and different developers prefer different form factors. If you choose the former option, you’ll need to ensure once you’ve selected the workload that on the right-hand pane (‘Installation details’) the checkboxes for Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager and Google Android Emulator are selected (as seen above).
This article will help you to do basic android application through visual studio. I'll put the link here below down.
https://developer.okta.com/blog/2018/12/27/build-a-basic-android-app-with-xamarin-and-visual-studio
If you want to create an Android application using c# language you can use Xamarin.
they created this great Cross Platform development tool which enables developers to develop iOS and Android apps in C# language.
Xamarin is offered in different licenses from free to enterprise levels but for not I will be using the starter version which is the free version. It includes the Xamarin Studio which is great start for those who want to try out creating their first apps for Android, they also offer a Business license which lets you develop in Visual Studio so you can use that rich experience similar to developing Web Apps or Windows Apps, then they have this Enterprise which contains everything
You can use Visual Studio 2015 to building cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, and Windows.
IDE: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-US/explore/cordova-vs
Hope this will help!