Increase Android development speed

Question

being a Java/Linux advocate, and having programmed my first Android app a while ago, nowadays I'm building a similar one this time in WPF (it's likely to be run in WP7). I have to admit that so far Eclipse/ADT seems to be no match to VisualStudio 9 in regards to development speed. The latter excels in the build/run speed cycle (it's obvious being Eclipse a java based app). Being my development HW an i3 laptop/4GB RAM/Win7 x64, my questions are:

• Could I get a similar development speed I have today in VS9 in the "Android" environmnent if I had a state of the art processor (i7 ?)
• Would I have a performance boost if I worked in a Linux partition in my laptop?

Any additional hints are welcome.

Thanks

Answer 1

The primary reason ADT feels bulky and slow is because it is constantly rebuilding in the background. This proves useful when showing compile errors and warnings as you type, but when working on larger projects—especially when making changes to the manifest, XML files (including layouts, drawables and strings) and resources—the IDE will regularly lock up with a build progress bar, as some changes require a rebuild to complete.

You can disable automatic building via the Project menu. I use this regularly when making changes to layouts, but enable it again when writing code.

As for hardware: it appears that aapt runs only on one core, and from my experience, it runs noticeably faster on faster cores vs. more cores. (This is anecdotal, since the comparison here is a PC with two 2.11 GHz cores vs. a laptop with two 1.8 GHz cores.)

A colleague uses Linux for development; I'll inquire if he has noticed any speed increase since switching from Windows.