Visual Studio has provided in-box support for building C++ Android and iOS apps or libraries since VS 2015, enabling cross-platform C++ mobile development with full editing and debugging capabilities all in one single IDE.
Just recently, we updated the tools to make it easier for you to work with newer versions of the Android platform. This includes built-in support for Android SDK API level 25 that was shipped in VS 2017 Version 15.5 and support for Android NDK R15C that just went out last week in the first preview of VS 2017 Version 15.6. You can either download the Preview, or, if you already have it installed, click on the notification you’ll receive in the product informing you that the update is available.
In the VS Installer, you will find “Android NDK (R15C)” and “Android SDK setup (API level 25)” as recommended components that are included in the “Mobile development with C++” workload.
Tell us what you’d like to see next in the VS C++ Android tools
We are continuing to work on supporting the latest Android platform. If there’s something else that you’d like to see us working on next in the VS C++ Android tools, feel free to leave comments below. You can also find us on Twitter (@VisualC). We look forward to hearing from you!
What we need is 1:1 experience with Android Studio, which means gradle+CMake. I can guess that anyone would have also Android Studio installed so VS should easily be set to use the SDK/NDK from Android Studio without the need to download them again. VS should be able to use the latest NDK – even betas not just the ones included in the VS installer. And finally I want all of that to be part of the Open Folder experience (somehow) so I can work on Windows and Android simultaneously.
Hi Crull,
This is great feedback! Thank you for sharing.
Theoretically, VS can work with SDK/NDKs that don’t come with VS by manually changing the SDK/NDK paths in VS project properties, unless there are any changes in the SDK/NDKs that require VS itself to react to. We will try the best to catch up with these changes.
Your suggestions on CMake and Open Folder experiences align with what we are thinking. Great to have them confirmed :) We will look into these scenarios.
Thanks again for the feedback,
Rong
I add my feedback to Crull’s
The Android SDK/NDK installers are useless to me, because they are always outdated, NDK 16 already had two updates, while you are adding NDK 15 now, and I have them always installed anyway.
Currently I always use two IDEs, Visual Studio for the Windows based version, and Android Studio when I am developing the Android variant.
Thanks for the feedback. This makes sense. This helps us prioritize supporting newer NDK/SDKs (potentially without inbox installation support) at a much faster cadence.
It is good to read that you are still invested in this project as there wasn’t much development in the past months.
While Android Studio is a nice product I highly dislike its performance also any other platform I am working on is on Visual Studio. I have to maintain a Visual Studio solution targeting from Nintendo to PS and any platform in between and that for a small team is a nightmare. Having something like Open Folder/CMake experience to target all these platforms without the need to switch between Android Studio, Qt Creator.. or another instance for Visual Studio just for UWP would be much, much better and off loading a big maintenance burden.
Last time I checked how would VS work with external NDK/SDK – it wasn’t a smooth experience. I also think that NDK r17/r18 will be milestone releases due to dropping GCC so I hope you get support for them much sooner than earlier releases.
Let me remind you that Google have added Kotlin support and you’ll have to do that too :)
Thanks for the details. We are certainly looking at supporting SDK/NDKs beta releases. Yes, we are aware of Kotlin support, but let’s get the C++ support right first. :)
So, when will that happen?
There isn’t a committed timeframe yet, but we’re working on improving this scenario.
Curious if there are any updates on the state of this project. We’re working on porting some existing Windows library code to an Android project that we’re starting, and would like to continue using Visual Studio for development. Our existing code relies on CMake, and I tried unsuccessfully to create an Android build in VS 2015 using the instructions at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/15/support-for-android-cmake-projects-in-visual-studio/ which seems to be an abandoned side project. Has VS2017 come out with more mature support for the Android/CMake combination?
Hi Ryan,
Android/CMake support hasn’t been built into VS 2017, but it is something we’re looking at right now. We’re evaluating native CMake support for Android in Visual Studio that would not require the generation of a VS sln file. If that’s a solution you’d be interested in trying out, we can work with you on providing early bits as soon as we have something working. In the meantime, the instructions in the blog post should still work with VS2017, and we can help take a look at the issues you ran into. Email me ronglu at Microsoft.com, and we can follow up with you offline.
Thanks
Rong
Hi RongLu,
Thanks for the reply, glad to hear this is still an avenue that Microsoft is working on improving. I was able to get our code building for Android with the integrated CMake in VS2017 using the Ninja generator, but I’m not sure how useful this will prove without the ability to use VS for deployment/debugging, although if there is an avenue for doing so using the emulator that you could help me work out that would be excellent. As far as using the older VS2015 instructions with the forked version of CMake, I’ll send you an email explaining what I’ve tried and what’s not working. There’s a response on that blog post from another user, several years old, where he’d hit the same problem but immediately responded that ‘some environment variable’ was to blame, without any real explanation, so if you’ve got any insight I’d appreciate it
Thanks,
Ryan