I am new to android dev, own an HTC Eris Droid (OS = 1.5 or 1.6 I believe). I am primarily a Microsoft .NET developer and am trying to figure out where to start.
What dev IDEs are suggested. I've seen the droid dev site and they suggest Eclipse. But which one?
Will installing Eclipse and the JRE interfere with .NET development?
What else will I need to get started? My OS is Win7.
TIA
As a .NET developer who has recently been looking at Android development, I can give you the steps I used:
Download Eclipse Classic 32-bit (as recommend by the Android docs) and extract it to a folder where it has write permissions (I use %homepath%\applications\eclipse\3.5\)
Download and extract the Android SDK to a permanent home and run SDK Setup.exe. Let it download/install all the packages
Add ANDROID_SDK_HOME\tools (expanded, obviously) to your %PATH% system environment variable in System Properties (WIN+BREAK)
Install the ADT (Android/Eclipse integration) plugin for Eclipse
Then to checkout the samples:
Create a workspace and a new Android project
Copy the contents of one of the samples (ANDROID_SDK_HOME\platforms\android-x.x\samples) into your project directory
Refresh your Eclipse view
I also strongly recommend checking out the Android Developer Guide and, in particular, reading the Application Fundamentals. It really gives a good overview of the terms used and the lifecycle of an application.
After that you can dive into the samples (installed by the SDK) with a little bit of clarity.
For development you will need*:
Java JDK - the JRE is not enough for Java development.
Eclipse - it doesn't really matter which "package" you choose, but for your needs the basic (smallest) one should be enough.
Android SDK + ADT
This should have no effect on .Net development, or on anything for that matter.
You don't actually need Eclipse and ADT, but since you asked about IDEs...
The android developer site system requirements says any version of Eclipse after 3.3.
Eclipse uses plugins to support different configurations that's why www.eclipse.org/downloads/ has so many different versions - they're the core IDE with different plugin configurations.
I'd recommend the 'Eclipse IDE for Java Developers' as this will have what you need without too many bits you don't - you can install additional plugins easily.
Of course, you'll also need to add the Android SDK once you have Eclipse - this is a set of tools and plugins that work with Eclipse.
Installing Eclipse and the JRE (Although you want the JDK - The Development Kit rather than just the runtime) will not interfere with your .Net development.
This version of Eclipse should work fine. Just select a download mirror.
You probably already have the JRE installed, but you should install the JDK from here.
Then you need to get the Android SDK, and ADT
After you install the Android SDK, it may be useful to create multiple virtual devices using the included Android emulator running different versions of Android. This will help you to learn features included in Android up to version 2.1 instead of being limited to your current device running 1.x.
Related
I am on Windows 8. I have some questions regarding Android SDK:
Can both IDEs share a common Android SDK?
Will there be any issues in updating IDEs?
Generally, yes, it's safe to share a common Android SDK for both Eclipse and Android Studio. Updating IDEs won't affect the SDK at all.
Take note when updating/deleting packages in Android SDK Manager: you might use some packages (e.g. specific API version) in a particular IDE (past example: Android "L" Developer Preview in Android Studio). Updating/deleting them may break the project that use them, and it might be difficult to fix the issue. However, for already-stable APIs like Android KitKat (API 19) and below, there won't be any issue when updating them.
Additional note: Android project created in either Android Studio or Eclipse is not really compatible to each other due to different project structure and technology. Therefor, it's better to always use the same IDE for projects that are created in it. If you want to test both IDEs on same project, it's better to export the project from Eclipse, instead of from Android Studio as it's easier.
I am sure this has been asked before, but I can not find a good answer. I want to create an Android app, I want to use Eclipse, but there are so many versions on the downloads page, and I am not sure which one I should use ... some of these include
>Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers
>Eclipse Classic 4.2.2
>Eclipse IDE for Java Developers
>Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers
>Eclipse for Mobile Developers
Thank You :)
I would recommend the ADT Bundle, as it has a suitable version of Eclipse, plus the necessary Android plumbing, in one download.
The answer depends on what you want to use in Eclipse. If you are just starting in the Eclipse world go for the smallest (lightweight) packages because they will also make your Eclipse experience smoother (loading, UI, etc.). From your list above I would choose Classic, but, if you ONLY want to focus on Android development, you could try the Google prepackaged version of Eclipse (ADT, see below).
You can install either:
standalone Eclipse plus the ADT plugins or
the prepackaged version of Eclipse with ADT provided by Google (recommended)
If you already have an Eclipse installed (which you probably want if you already use Eclipse and want to keep the existing worspaces/preferences/etc.) you can only install the ADT plugins from here. And both Indigo and Juno versions of Eclipse should work. Of course that you should try and upgrade your workspace first to Juno and than install the ADT plugins to avoid any other surprises.
The Google prepackaged version of Eclipse is here and will give you less headaches because you have almost everything into it. You only have to use the prepackaged download manager inside Eclipse to download platform versions and device images (and many other tools and examples). This will use Eclipse Juno version.
I would recommend the classic version, but in my opinion intelliJ is better
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/
Google has just announced at Google I/O a new IDE called "Android Studio" which
is based on IntelliJ and can be found here:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html
Any will do, but the most recommended one is Mobile. Also check the new IDE that Google released just for that (Android Studio).
Download Eclipse Installer from https://www.eclipse.org/ (top right
corner)
After downloading start installer.
Check if there is an option as "for Android Developers". If there is
not, click the updates button on top right corner. It downloads
updates for installer. After the download is completed check again
the list.
Download Eclipse for Android Developers.
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!
EDITED
Thought I'd follow up a bit more and add the info here (as opposed to adding more comments below).
After installing Galileo and finding it went well and no android problems, I installed Helios. It too went well and no Android problems (yet).
I did add the necessary lines to the eclipse config ini file to increase Memory size and added Garbage Collection. When I did this to Gannymede, it made a significant speed improvement but, I don't see any effect in either Galileo or Helios. Makes me think that since they are not natively added for these two versions (at least not for 64-bit Cocoa / Mac), they may not be used. Nonetheless, they seem to have no negative affect. If anyone has knowledge to share on this, I'm all ears...
Thanks
I'd like to get opinions on updating Eclipse for Android development.
I currently use Eclipse (Ganymede) 3.4.2. on a Mac (duo core intel)
I've read many posts regarding this and, while there are differing opinions, probably mostly with regard to the interface. I have read about issues with the Android SDK and ADT with Eclipse versions above 3.4.2. but, thus far, all posts seem to be prior to the Android Dev site recommending the following (they previously recommend not using above 3.4):
Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) or greater
Eclipse JDT plugin (included in most Eclipse IDE packages)
If you need to install or update Eclipse, you can download it from
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.
Several types of Eclipse packages
are available for each platform. For
developing Android applications, we
recommend that you install one of
these packages:
o Eclipse IDE for Java Developers
o Eclipse Classic (versions 3.5.1 and higher)
o Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers
Some questions:
Is there an advantage in switching from 3.4.2 Ganymede to Classic 3.5.1?
Is it worth the trouble?
Is anyone having compatibility issues with Android and the ADT? using 3.5.1?
Thanks - any input/recommendations are appreciated...
I don't encounter noticeable problems with Helios (3.6.1). We bundle Helios (Classic more or less) and a bunch of plugins we write together with ADT to form MOTODEV Studio. As a general rule, the integration and support for Android have gotten better with each Eclipse release. I don't believe the Android team tests against Ganymede any longer, so at the very least I'd suggest moving to Galileo.
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!