How can I use MS Visual Studio for Android Development?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

I applaud google for making a low bar entry into android development, but you have to be moronic in scale to think that professional developers who already use Visual studio would prefer to step down to an environment like Eclipse.

Visual studio is by far the best development environment on the planet. It's what proffessionals use. I suppose this is why there are so many Non-Proffessional apps out there for the Android.

Through Visual studio I can set up batch programs and do pretty much anything from the IDE that you can do from a dos prompt. Is google saying that you can not build an android app from the dos prompt?

Is everyone required to run Eclipse? Or some other Google Approved Package? I doubt it.

The whole thing boils down to people having personal attitudes about Microsoft, and flat refusing to publish information that would accelerate the Android presence. And thats just bad business.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

I completely agree. I am a native to developing in VS, and moving to an IDE like Eclipse is a hard step, but im learning its a necessary one. I have reasons for wanting to us VS to do my development, but not because im delusional enough to think that its superior. Yes, in most cases, it does alot of the miniscule stuff for you, plugins arent hard to setup, and if your already used to how to use it, its nice. So, having VS as an IDE for Android would be great, but im not saying its better by any means. Now, if anyone knows how to get VS to develop for Java, please reply and let me know.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

MonoDroid

Answer 8

Looking for a solution to this.

Eclipse is horrid truly horrid...

Answer 9

I've just installed all the stuff it's supposed to be needed to develop for Android. I'm just trying to do a bloody hello world. Start new project, Android project, bla, bla. Errors from Eclipse, just starting the project, ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2010-06-03 23:10:54.404 !MESSAGE Unable to create editor ID com.android.ide.eclipse.editors.manifest.ManifestEditor: Invalid Input: Must be IFileEditorInput !STACK 1 org.eclipse.ui.PartInitException: Invalid Input: Must be IFileEditorInput at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.editors.AndroidEditor.init(Unknown Source) !ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2010-06-11 19:01:55.971 !MESSAGE Unable to create editor ID com.android.ide.eclipse.editors.manifest.ManifestEditor: Invalid Input: Must be IFileEditorInput !STACK 1 org.eclipse.ui.PartInitException: Invalid Input: Must be IFileEditorInput !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.resources 8 2 2010-06-11 19:03:32.001 !MESSAGE Problems occurred when invoking code from plug-in: "org.eclipse.core.resources". !STACK 1 org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException: Project target not loaded yet. And so on... For Gods shake, this is f.... frustrating. Eclipse is just a crap!!! Of course, i have created also an emulator for an android device, start, several dos windows, which dissapear... and nothing happens!! What the hell am i doing wrong!!!*

Answer 10

well ECLIPSE is OK once you get used to it. but it is way off from the quality of visual studio 2010, which I do misss...

For example: first getting used to it can be painful. like it tries to 'compile' or 'build' xml files if they are open in your project when you hit "Run" and automatically creates an something.out.xml file which then fails the build process. Then closing the open XML files and deleteing the .out files you also need to clean the project.

plus i get null exception errors in the resource editor all the time, even though there are no blank entries, and even in a brand new project just using the editor from eclipse to create the resource entries.

for people who always use it probably they're used to that or they know how it works so it doesn't bother them. but in visual studio never have to think about crap like that it just works. and if there is a build error the detailed information VS provides is so much more, easier to find out why, plus code analyzer for code meeting style/security requirements(i.e.StyleCop/FXCop). Maybe this is also available for eclipse/android dev but didn't see it yet.

Answer 11

I'm having similar issues with Eclipse on Windows 7 Home Premium. This isn't about which IDE is better, it's about being able to use the IDE a person is most comfortable with. I'm sure Eclipse is a wonderful environment on Linux and Mac OS X, but on Windows it bites. I think the problems I'm having with it are in the JDK and JRE installs. Funny thing is though that when I am able to finally execute my 'Hello, Android' application, it runs just fine.

Now, could someone please answer the original question: Is there a way to develop Android apps in Visual Studio (I'm running 2010) or are we stuck with trying to get Eclipse to run on Windows? Personally, if it has to be the latter, I'll deal with it, but I would much rather have a solution for developing in Visual Studio.

Answer 12

Any other details surrounding this question? I'm all ears for anyone with wisdom out there. The previous posts comment points to an iPhone related SDK, not Android.