After creating POIApp, the project will be opened within the environment. The following screenshot depicts Xamarin Studio after the project has been created:

Xamarin Studio is organized like many modern IDEs with a set of menus at the top of the screen, a context-sensitive toolbar below it, and a series of dockable pads for viewing and manipulating various types of content. By default Xamarin Studio is configured with the following options:

Additional pads can be accessed from View | Pads.

There are numerous options that can be set, which affect the way an app is built and executed. These options can be adjusted from within the Project Options view.

When an app is selected from the home screen on an Android device, the Android OS creates an instance of the activity in the application you have declared to be the launch activity. When developing with the Android SDK, this is specified in the AndroidManifest.xml file. The following code excerpt from AndroidManifest.xml shows how to specify that MainActivity should be launched first:

<activity android:label="POIApp" android:name="poiapp.MainActivity">
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>
</activity>

Xamarin.Android provides a more convenient method of specifying this by the use of .NET attributes. These .NET attributes are used at build time to construct the ApplicationManifest.xml file so that you rarely ever need to worry about working with the file directly. In the case of specifying the initial activity to launch, setting MainLauncher to true does the job, as seen in the following code example:

[Activity (Label = "POIApp", MainLauncher = true)]
public class MainActivity : Activity
{
  . . .
}

The way in which you run and debug apps is very important to developers as it has a big impact on productivity and timelines. Xamarin Studio and the Android emulator team up to make the testing and debugging cycle as painless as possible. Let's go through the steps:

As you can see from this section, Xamarin Studio and the Android emulator facilitates a robust intuitive way of executing and debugging applications.

The emulators presented when we ran our app were set up as part of the Xamarin install. You can customize these existing emulators or create your own in order to adjust the features and software configuration for the device being emulated.

In order to modify an existing emulator, perform the following steps:

There are many options that can be modified in order to emulate any device and configuration needed. The Android Virtual Device Manager dialog box also has a tab named Device Definitions that can be used to set up the devices that are available when configuring an AVD. The following screenshot shows what can be configured as part of the device definition:

Android provides an x86 emulator that can speed up development considerably due to faster start and execution times for the AVD. The x86 emulator is not a part of the base Xamarin install, but the directions for installation can be found on the Xamarin website as well as the Android developer website. A very specific version may be required, particularly if using OSX Mavericks, so we will not replicate the directions here.

Once installed, you can take advantage of the x86 emulator by the selected Intel Atom (x86) for the CPU/ABI when editing an AVD configuration.

Apps can be executed and debugged on actual devices with the same simplicity of working with an emulator. To prepare for using a physical device, you need to perform a few steps as follows: