Is it possible to develop Android apps with visual studio 2010

Is there a plugin or something I can use to develop Android Apps with visual studio 2010, I'm most interested in free plugins, I know about monodroid, but to my kno开发者_如何学运维wledge it's quite a price solution, so if there are other ways I'd be very happy.

I don't think there's currently anything free and production quality for Android development on VS, but there seems to be some effort towards making such a plugin a reality.

Unless they've removed the ability to launch external tools from recent versions of visual studio, you should be able to use it as an editor for java code and launch an ant build script from it. You might even be able to pipe stderr back through some sed scripts that would put the errors in a form that would make them clickable.

Perhaps that isn't how you want to use it, but then you didn't specify what language or development method you wanted to use, only that you wanted to employ visual studio.

Here is a new one. (Note that it has just been released and is in tech preview stage): http://www.dot42.com

It is basically a Visual Studio add-in that lets you compile your C# code directly to DEX code. This means there is no run-time requirement such as Mono.

Disclosure: I work for this company

There's MonoDroid to write Android apps in C#, but it is currently in private beta and won't be free.

If you're okay with coding exclusively in C/C++ with the NDK, try 'vs-android'. It brings the Android GCC compiler and linker into the environment, such that they behave just like Microsoft's compilation tools.

It's free and open-source, and can be downloaded here: http://code.google.com/p/vs-android/

Xamarin will let you take advantage of Visual Studio, letting you develop for Android and Windows Phone using C#. You can also use some 75% of the same code base and develop for the iPhone, assuming you have a Mac.

one option could also be, to look into Visual GDB, which I have used for cross compiling for Linux and embedded devices. It is cheap compared to what is out there, but not "free". But take a look at it. I have not tried it for Android, but it is supported.

Though this is an old thread, the new versions of Visual Studio have incorporated Xamarin, and do let you write Android apps.