Developing Android applications with Visual Studio 2008

Question

Hi all,

I've recently obtained an HTC Desire and I'm interested in porting my 3D engine to the device. I have a slight annoyance however. I'd love to be able to do development under Visual Studio 2008. Am I to assume I'm going to need to re-process my SLN files to do GCC builds? Its not a vast issue as I already have an application that processes SLN and VCProj files through GCC and then links them together at the other end. I'll just need to set up the right libraries with it.

Are there any other gotchas I need to think about? Or, indeed, is there an easier way?

Any info would be much appreciated!

Cheers :)

Answer 1

You will need to use your own or the NDK supplied build system. I believe Visual Studio can be set up to call external commands to build. You can of course use Visual Studio as the code editor, and call the NDK supplied make on the Makefile to build your application. You can't use Visual Studio as a debugger.

Answer 2

Im not used with VS. Using it to develop android apps sounds like pain to me. Main reason is that i dont think it got any plugins for android as Eclipse does. I guess you can use it as pure Java IDE (??), but still... building, editing and syntax hightlighting, code-autocomplete, etc etc... will be missing...

Answer 3

Follow the instructions on using Ant to do builds and you should be able to figure out how to make the VS build process drive your apps.

I don't understand the desire to use such a terrible code editor, but anyone trying to set up their IDE to build Android apps should start with the Ant stuff that they document.