Android programming and frameworks / IDEs to use?

Question

I'm quite new to Android programming, I'm mainly a .NET guy =)

I've done several projects in Windows Phone, and I feel pretty comfortable with the MVVM pattern, C# and so on However, I want to get into Android development, because it's an important platform

I wanted to know what's the best free approach where I can reuse some of my skills to reduce the learning curve

I've been investigating and I saw several options..

• Xamarin seems like the best of everything, were you can use cross platform code using visual studio. This is great, but you have to pay to use it (even if I use the free version, I may want to publish some apps later, but don't want to spend that amount of money just to do a couple of apps on my own). So I'd say it's out of the queestion
• I've seen something called MVVM Cross, however I don't know if that requires Xamarin or something else to work?
• If I use pure android development frameworks, what's recommended? I've tried Android Studio, which is not that bad as eclipse, but compared to visual studio it has a long way to go. However it seems that the only way to use visual studio and android is to use xamarin..

Also, is there any approach to android programming that's the best? (as MVVM is the best for windows phone apps and the pattern embraced my microsoft)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure it's a suitable question for SO...

Anyway, here is my opinion regarding the IDE.

Eclipse + ADT-plugin was the "official" IDE supported by Google. But Google decide to develop an other solution based on IntelliJ : Android-Studio. So Eclipse is the legacy IDE and not the best choice if you are new to Android development.

On the other hand, Android-Studio is still in early development stage. I tried it a few weeks ago and in my opinion and for my use case (quite huge multi-module project) there was too many issues to work efficiently with it in it's current state.

Third option: IntelliJ-12 (free edition) is my current choice. It offers a smooth integration with android tools. It is stable. The UI is very similar to Android-Studio (and so switching to Android-Studio when it will be ready will be an easy step).