How can I use MS Visual Studio for Android Develop

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

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

Answer 2

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 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

If you're interested in producing HTML5 hybrid applications (web apps wrapped in a native container giving access to device functions), the Nomad Visual Studio extension supports building for android devices.