Android Development Stack
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I definitely like JetBrains IntelliJ for working on Android stuff. Xamarin and the C#/.NET stack would be my preferred choice, but my client uses Java for everything. The Android developer IDE didn't work for me. Also, it took a while to figure out how to get the emulation stuff to work, and even then, I still haven't figured out how to make it faster. The emulators out there are dog fucking slow, so I ended up setting up my phone, which was easy to do in IntelliJ. However, setting up my phone to test software required figuring out which android version it's using and downloading the correct SDK. It's a process. Marc
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I'm using Genymotion as an emulator which works quite well and certainly much faster than the Google supplied emulator. Genymotion is based on virtualbox. As for using a real phone: I installed the correct USB drivers (normally supplied by your phone manufacturer, worked for me with HTC and Samsung) and Eclipse AND Android Studio automagically recognized it.
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I strongly recommend Xamarin[^]. It's not free, but IMHO the benefits of being able to code in C# (and use VS if you can afford Xamarin Business Edition) are great. Xamarin Studio is a Visual Studio look-alike (but is not Visual Studio!) and may be sufficient for your needs. If so, you can buy the Indie ($300/yr) license and upgrade later, if necessary.
- Xamarin imposes no noticeable performance hit, and Xamarin Forms is a great abstraction over Android, iOS and WinPhone.
- Note that Xamarin is not a "once size fits all" solution. You need to know how Android and the Android APIs work (which is a good thing, since whatever works in Java will work exactly the same way in Xamarin). Xamarin provides C# bindings over Android (and iOS).
- Their new emulator (currently in Alpha) is miles ahead of anything else. If you don't want to use alpha technology, I recommend using the (free) Genymotion emu. The Google and Intel emus suck hugely.
Re: books, the O'Reilly pair (Learning Android and Programming Android) are what got me wildly excited about the OS. Petzold is working on a book for programming mobile apps using Xamarin. See this[^] link. IIRC, Xamarin has made a preview edition available for free. Data point: another dev and I built a non-trivial iOS (he) and Android (me) client app for our company as a POC, using Xamarin. The app had a rich UI, worked identically on iOS and Android and easily communicated with an array of existing back-end services. We were able to get it done quickly (3-4 months) since we're originally C# devs. StackOverflow, CP and the Xamarin forums provided a wealth of info when we had questions. The POC was very well received and proved Xamarin was a viable technology for us if we want to quickly develop multi-platform mobile clients. The only thing that's prevented me from going whole hog on Xamarin (for Android dev) is my lack of free time. Once I'm done upgrading a couple of my freeware C# apps (with a user base of 10K+), I intend to buy Xamarin for myself and will begin to develop mobile versions of these a
Thank you
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Start at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/android/#Android+Tutorial+Contest[^], lots of really good quality articles that will get you started. Although not Visual Studio based, with your experience you should find Android Studio or eclipse easy to get on with.
Thank you
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Please do
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
LevelUp Tuts, 30 video's ... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnpHn493BHF33bSvIA0ySchxXkrib8TK[^] Derek Banas, 24 video's ... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGLfVvz_LVvSPjWpLPFEfOCbezi6vATIh[^] Derek Banas, 25 video's ... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGLfVvz_LVvSKgnFm8-6Fz1cd6zt_KxTC[^] NOTE ... Some do not care for the Derek Banas style of "tutorials" I'm sure there are many other tutorials "out there".
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LevelUp Tuts, 30 video's ... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnpHn493BHF33bSvIA0ySchxXkrib8TK[^] Derek Banas, 24 video's ... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGLfVvz_LVvSPjWpLPFEfOCbezi6vATIh[^] Derek Banas, 25 video's ... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGLfVvz_LVvSKgnFm8-6Fz1cd6zt_KxTC[^] NOTE ... Some do not care for the Derek Banas style of "tutorials" I'm sure there are many other tutorials "out there".
Thank you Sir!
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Thank you Sir!
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
Regarding the Android SDK, irrespective of the developer tool, be prepared to download not much short of 10 Gigs of data (system-images, docs, platform tools etc) if you want oldest to newest, that is after you have downloaded and installed the developer environment.
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I have 25+ years of development experience, the last 13 or so in .Net. Now I want to venture into Android. I'd like to work in Visual Studio since it's what I know. 1. What tools do I need? 2. Entry level book recommendation. Many Thanks
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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I have 25+ years of development experience, the last 13 or so in .Net. Now I want to venture into Android. I'd like to work in Visual Studio since it's what I know. 1. What tools do I need? 2. Entry level book recommendation. Many Thanks
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
You can enroll in Coursera MOOC "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems": https://class.coursera.org/androidpart1-001[^]. The course has just started.
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I have 25+ years of development experience, the last 13 or so in .Net. Now I want to venture into Android. I'd like to work in Visual Studio since it's what I know. 1. What tools do I need? 2. Entry level book recommendation. Many Thanks
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
You can check out Xamarin visual studio tool. It will enable you to develop cross-platform applications: Android, Windows Phone and iOS. http://xamarin.com/[^]
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I strongly recommend Xamarin[^]. It's not free, but IMHO the benefits of being able to code in C# (and use VS if you can afford Xamarin Business Edition) are great. Xamarin Studio is a Visual Studio look-alike (but is not Visual Studio!) and may be sufficient for your needs. If so, you can buy the Indie ($300/yr) license and upgrade later, if necessary.
- Xamarin imposes no noticeable performance hit, and Xamarin Forms is a great abstraction over Android, iOS and WinPhone.
- Note that Xamarin is not a "once size fits all" solution. You need to know how Android and the Android APIs work (which is a good thing, since whatever works in Java will work exactly the same way in Xamarin). Xamarin provides C# bindings over Android (and iOS).
- Their new emulator (currently in Alpha) is miles ahead of anything else. If you don't want to use alpha technology, I recommend using the (free) Genymotion emu. The Google and Intel emus suck hugely.
Re: books, the O'Reilly pair (Learning Android and Programming Android) are what got me wildly excited about the OS. Petzold is working on a book for programming mobile apps using Xamarin. See this[^] link. IIRC, Xamarin has made a preview edition available for free. Data point: another dev and I built a non-trivial iOS (he) and Android (me) client app for our company as a POC, using Xamarin. The app had a rich UI, worked identically on iOS and Android and easily communicated with an array of existing back-end services. We were able to get it done quickly (3-4 months) since we're originally C# devs. StackOverflow, CP and the Xamarin forums provided a wealth of info when we had questions. The POC was very well received and proved Xamarin was a viable technology for us if we want to quickly develop multi-platform mobile clients. The only thing that's prevented me from going whole hog on Xamarin (for Android dev) is my lack of free time. Once I'm done upgrading a couple of my freeware C# apps (with a user base of 10K+), I intend to buy Xamarin for myself and will begin to develop mobile versions of these a
Agree Xamarin is what you want if you want to stay Visual Studio like. There is a free legal version of it. You can use it also for small business
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Agree Xamarin is what you want if you want to stay Visual Studio like. There is a free legal version of it. You can use it also for small business
Unfortunately, the free Starter version has several limitations: no integration with VStudio, limited (although recently increased) app size, and no access to Xamarin Forms. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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I strongly recommend Xamarin[^]. It's not free, but IMHO the benefits of being able to code in C# (and use VS if you can afford Xamarin Business Edition) are great. Xamarin Studio is a Visual Studio look-alike (but is not Visual Studio!) and may be sufficient for your needs. If so, you can buy the Indie ($300/yr) license and upgrade later, if necessary.
- Xamarin imposes no noticeable performance hit, and Xamarin Forms is a great abstraction over Android, iOS and WinPhone.
- Note that Xamarin is not a "once size fits all" solution. You need to know how Android and the Android APIs work (which is a good thing, since whatever works in Java will work exactly the same way in Xamarin). Xamarin provides C# bindings over Android (and iOS).
- Their new emulator (currently in Alpha) is miles ahead of anything else. If you don't want to use alpha technology, I recommend using the (free) Genymotion emu. The Google and Intel emus suck hugely.
Re: books, the O'Reilly pair (Learning Android and Programming Android) are what got me wildly excited about the OS. Petzold is working on a book for programming mobile apps using Xamarin. See this[^] link. IIRC, Xamarin has made a preview edition available for free. Data point: another dev and I built a non-trivial iOS (he) and Android (me) client app for our company as a POC, using Xamarin. The app had a rich UI, worked identically on iOS and Android and easily communicated with an array of existing back-end services. We were able to get it done quickly (3-4 months) since we're originally C# devs. StackOverflow, CP and the Xamarin forums provided a wealth of info when we had questions. The POC was very well received and proved Xamarin was a viable technology for us if we want to quickly develop multi-platform mobile clients. The only thing that's prevented me from going whole hog on Xamarin (for Android dev) is my lack of free time. Once I'm done upgrading a couple of my freeware C# apps (with a user base of 10K+), I intend to buy Xamarin for myself and will begin to develop mobile versions of these a
Thanks for this well-written overview, Ravi-ji ! If one wanted to use the "Indie" subscription, that's US $25 per month per platform. So, licensing for the two available targets, Android, and iOS, would cost $50 per month.
«I'm asked why doesn't C# implement feature X all the time. The answer's always the same: because no one ever designed, specified, implemented, tested, documented, shipped that feature. All six of those things are necessary to make a feature happen. They all cost huge amounts of time, effort and money.» Eric Lippert, Microsoft, 2009
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Thanks for this well-written overview, Ravi-ji ! If one wanted to use the "Indie" subscription, that's US $25 per month per platform. So, licensing for the two available targets, Android, and iOS, would cost $50 per month.
«I'm asked why doesn't C# implement feature X all the time. The answer's always the same: because no one ever designed, specified, implemented, tested, documented, shipped that feature. All six of those things are necessary to make a feature happen. They all cost huge amounts of time, effort and money.» Eric Lippert, Microsoft, 2009
Aloha, Bill-ji! Yes, I was referring to Android only. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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I have 25+ years of development experience, the last 13 or so in .Net. Now I want to venture into Android. I'd like to work in Visual Studio since it's what I know. 1. What tools do I need? 2. Entry level book recommendation. Many Thanks
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
I would also suggest Xamarin, especially if you want to stick with VS. However, it isn't all roses. Aside from the licensing & hardware costs (if you want to do iOS work but normally run Windows on a PC), I have found Xamarin Forms to be buggy and deficient in terms of features. There are lots of weird issues with the tools, particularly things like VS randomly losing it's connection to the mac build host (if you aren't running VS on the mac itself) and so on. Xamarin upgrades usually break everything, at least until you find the magical reboot order. Right now I have an existing published app, but Apple have just changed the rules (at least a couple of months ago) so all apps must soon have 64 bit versions. Xamarin have only just released their non-alpha update for 'unified API' support, and because I work in VS and not Xamarin Studio on a mac the upgrade process for my project was very manual. I also encountered some weird issues during the upgrade that I couldn't find solutions for on the internet, but eventually managed to work through on my own. Unfortunately I'm using a couple of open source libraries to handle things Xamarin Forms doesn't do well cross-platform (access to contacts/camera and image manipulation), and those libraries haven't been converted, so I can't finish converting my app. I'm now trying to decide whether to update those libraries myself (ugh), or wait to see if the authors are successful in time for the two deadlines published by Apple. None of this is actually helping me with my app, and if I had written natively for Apple I would still have had some work to do, but could have started sooner and wouldn't have the x-platform issues to worry about. I know you said Android (so Google, not Apple), but I just wanted to point out some of the pitfalls of Xamarin. Also don't be fooled by 'Xamarin imposes no performance hit' - there are lots of known issues with the Xamarin Forms ListView integration, and even a few with the label control (!). Even without Xamarin Forms, if you aren't careful on Android specifically, you can end up with memory/performance problems because two different GC's start fighting each other. I am persevering with Xamarin, but a few devs I know from Twitter have given up and gone on to use the native tools for each platform because Xamarin was just too frustrating for them. Which is not to say Xamarin doesn't have it's good parts, the fact it works at all is astounding. I'm just saying don't believe all the marketing hype. As far as books go, I think Amazon
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Dang. I've been putting off caring about Android because of Eclipse. But if the new one doesn't work either, I guess I can keep ignoring it.
TTFN - Kent