Android development in Visual Studio. Am I crazy? (opens in new tab)

Just a little bit of my backstory so that you read this through the correct lens: I was a .Net dev and used Visual Studio for years, then my company sold me as a Java dev and I was forced to use Eclipse for just over a year.

I liked Visual Studio, I was really comfortable in it, I understood it's quirks and it had a reasonably nice workflow. I didn't like Eclipse, it was weird and different and I couldn't work as productively in it. But I was _forced_ to use it for a year, I learned that Eclipse prizes the "type-to-navigate" feature, and I learned to love this.

So this next part comes from someone who has felt the Eclipse pain and genuinely enjoys both IDEs (and for the record spends all of his time now in TextMate and Terminal).

I think your idea has a bad cost / benefit ratio. Android moves quickly, the developer community and mindshare is set up in Eclipse and the tools produced within by Google and other Third Parties. I think there is probably an audience for a Visual Studio plug-in, but make no mistake, Eclispe and VS offer a similar amount of functionality, the tools that you find cumbersome on Eclipse were written by people that work in Android all day everyday. You are setting yourself up to try to make a toolset that offers feature parity with the official toolchain. You will also need to offer up tutorials and documentation so that people will use it.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this, I'm just saying that you should be realistic with the upfront cost of doing this and the ongoing cost, especially considering the amazing rate of progress Google is throwing at Android. I think in the long run it would probably be a lot easier to work in Eclipse, but that's from someone that's already gotten through the pain of transitioning to Eclipse.

It seems to me like the problems you're having, like intellisense not working correctly and the debugger being broken, are problems with the SDK tools and not with Eclipse itself. Writing your own tools I fear you will run in to many of the same problems. While I feel that you're right in saying developing Windows C++ apps under VS is a superior experience as compared to developing Linux C++ apps under Eclipse, Visual Studio cross-target development kits I've used in the past tended to be sub-par compared to either. Many degenerate in to rather dumb text editors with project management. From a technical standpoint, integrating with intellisense and the graphical debugger is much more difficult under Visual Studio. Either way, good luck and keep us posted!

I would use it, but probably not pay a TON, as my interest in Android development is as a hobbiest not a professional.

I'd definitely pay $99, probably pay $199, but definitely wouldn't pay $499.

By the way, you might get a better sample posting this same question at http://programmers.stackexchange.com -- it's a more Microsoft-centric crowd than Hacker News.

Yes! When Android first came out I submitted an app to Google's app competition. I hated the experience in Eclipse so much that I never went back. Visual Studio support would be fantastic.

I have looked at it, but I haven't given it the amount of time that I have given Eclipse. I just ran into too many bugs that revolved around its interaction with the emulator.

There's a tip that should be more public! I will try that.

You're absolutely right. Getting VS to edit Java files and build the apks wasn't too difficult. What will make it awesome is getting intellisense working. I will have to write a language service for that.

Oh yes! Those are the two biggest reasons that I love VS.

The NDK is really only good for writing back end stuff. You can't do any UI with it.