Native Android Development - Alternative to Eclipse

Started by Blizzard, February 16, 2013, 06:09:44 am

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Blizzard

Most of you who have developed for Android so far probably had to use Eclipse. It's always a hassle if you have to maintain more than one project file so that you can build your programs, apps and games on multiple platforms. Apple uses a rather closed model and you have to use XCode for building for the Mac and iOS, but at least it covers two platforms at once. For Window you will most probably use Visual Studio. Now, there is an alternative for Eclipse if you are using Visual Studio. You may not get some of the fancy tools from Eclipse (which I'm not missing anyway, BTW) and Intellisense may not work so well, but at least you can build native Android apps (or even full Android Java apps) from Visual Studio. What allows this is something called vs-android:

http://code.google.com/p/vs-android/

We've been using this at our company for over a year now and I am very satisfied. It's true that the developer may be checking in once every few months, but yours truly is taking care of it. I actually even put together (with the help of some other guy, check out the Troubleshooting section at the bottom) the newest version to work with VS 2012 (which I highly recommend in combination with vs-android).

All you have to do is to set up a new platform (Android) after installing vs-android and set up your project. It may take a while until you figure out "the right combination" so I recommend that you check out how our engine April & Friends is set up (Open Source projects). All demos in the projects libapril, libatres, libaprilui and libaprilparticle work with vs-android and can be compiled for Android and deployed without problems.
Keep in mind that APRIL currently works with Java glue code. That means that APRIL apps are native, but the "starting code" is in Java.

In any case, I can recommend vs-android because you can easily get your C++ code to run on Android.
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