Bonus on How To: Building Android Application - Part 3

After going through the Part 1 and Part 2 of “How To: Building Android Application”, we will go explore more on the android sample and some tips to improve the performance of the emulator.

Playing with Android Sample Application

In this tutorial, we will setup the Android sample application which will help you play with most of the android components.

Step1: click on File->New->Other and then select Android->Android Sample Project

click Next and Finish.

in case you see “ This target has no samples. Please select another target.” message, you should click Windows->Android SDK Manager and select the sample and other versions (if needed) and Install the packages. This step will take a while. After that is done, retry Step 1.

useful emulator Shortcuts:

Alt+Enter maximizes the emulator. Nice for demos.

Ctrl+F11 changes the orientation of the emulator.

F8 turns network on / off.

F6 to turn on / off the trackball

Performance Considerations

Try to use a smaller resolution for your emulator as for example HVGA. The emulator gets slower the more pixels its needs to render as it is using software rendering.
While creating device (e.g. myDevice), set the flag "Enabled" for Snapshots. This will save the state of the emulator and let it start much faster.