Tuesday 5 May 2015

How to use Visual Studio’s 2015 Android Emulator in Android Studio or Eclipse

Microsoft introduced Android Emulator in Visual Studio 2015, which is currently available as Release Candidate, this emulator uses Hyper-V with virtual machines running on Android x86 platform. So emulator is super fast and has a lot of nice features previously known just to Windows Phone emulators, like zooming, easy location mocking, simulating camera with real images, drag and drop APK files etc, ...

But the best part is, that this great emulator with all its nice features can be also used when developing Android applications with Android Studio or Eclipse. Just with two additional steps:

1.) Prepare and run desired VS Android emulator in Visual Studio, for detail read this article

2.) Check IP address of Android emulator device Settings \ WiFi \ Advanced\ Ip Address

Getting current IP address of Android device

3.) Run Command "ADB connect ipaddress"


4.) Now VS Android emulator should be available for running and debugging Android applications in either Eclipse or Android Studio.


Enjoy!