In this tutorial I will show you how to write an Android App with the SoftPixel Engine. For this I use the VisualStudio 2010 IDE (Express Edition) because this is the only IDE I know for which an Android NDK plugin exists. First of all download VisualStudio 2010 Express Edition or use the profesional version. The plugin should work for both express and professional version. Then you have to download the Android SDK and the Android NDK.

The SDK is used for Java. We don't need to write any code in Java but your App will always run in the Dalvik Virtual Machine (This is the Java Virutal Machine for Google's Android platform). To use the Android SDK you jave to use the eclipse IDE. We only need this to build the final App. But the most coding will be done with VisualStudio 2010.

The NDK is used for 'native' development, i.e. to program the native processor in C or C++.

The next this we download is the VisualStudio plugin for the Android NDK which is called vs-android. This pluging will enable to use the Android GNU C++ Compiler in the VisualStudio IDE.
By the way: Another way to compile C++ code for Android is to write an own makefile. But that is not part of this tutorial.

To summarize everything you need:

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That's about it ;-). Now you should be able to compile the program by pressing "F9" (with default configuration of VisualStudio) and then pressing the play button in the toolbar. If you have questions please join our community.