Question

I am new to android dev, own an HTC Eris Droid (OS = 1.5 or 1.6 I believe). I am primarily a Microsoft .NET developer and am trying to figure out where to start.

What dev IDEs are suggested. I’ve seen the droid dev site and they suggest Eclipse. But which one?

Will installing Eclipse and the JRE interfere with .NET development?

What else will I need to get started? My OS is Win7.

TIA

Answer 1

As a .NET developer who has recently been looking at Android development, I can give you the steps I used:

1. Download Eclipse Classic 32-bit (as recommend by the Android docs) and extract it to a folder where it has write permissions (I use %homepath%\applications\eclipse\3.5\)
2. Download and extract the Android SDK to a permanent home and run SDK Setup.exe. Let it download/install all the packages
3. Add ANDROID_SDK_HOME\tools (expanded, obviously) to your %PATH% system environment variable in System Properties (WIN+BREAK)
4. Install the ADT (Android/Eclipse integration) plugin for Eclipse

Then to checkout the samples:

1. Create a workspace and a new Android project
2. Copy the contents of one of the samples (ANDROID_SDK_HOME\platforms\android-x.x\samples) into your project directory
3. Refresh your Eclipse view

I also strongly recommend checking out the Android Developer Guide and, in particular, reading the Application Fundamentals. It really gives a good overview of the terms used and the lifecycle of an application.

After that you can dive into the samples (installed by the SDK) with a little bit of clarity.