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Microsoft Adds Android Emulator to Visual Studio

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Among the array of exciting announcements following yesterday’s Visual Studio “Connect()” developer conference in New York, Microsoft shared insight into an extension for creating Android apps from within Visual Studio.  An Android emulator (including a Clang compiler and LLVM infrastructure) will allow developers to build Android applications while benefiting from the numerous advantages offered by the Visual Studio IDE. 

This is a terrific advantage for Android developers who sorely need a high-performance Android emulator.  The emulator can work within Visual Studio but can operate stand-alone too, so developers using Eclipse will also be able to benefit from the emulator.  It uses a custom x86 build of AOSP, optimized for the Hyper-V virtualization platform to achieve the best efficiency.

The ‘Visual Studio Emulator for Android Preview’ can be downloaded today and offers developers an integrated experience that also supports Apache Cordova and Xamarin-based projects.

Daniel Moth, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft, talks more about the emulator in this 11-minute video here.