Download Visual Studio Android Emulator.

The Genymotion emulator is noticably faster, but it requires some baggage: VirtualBox - which doesn't play well with Parallels Desktop 9 out of the box. The AVD emulator that comes with the Android SDK is fine, but it could be better. Once the project initializes, you should see your already running Mac emulator listed in the device dropdown.Īnd that's it! - You can debug all day long from Parallels over to your Mac. Launch your Xamarin IDE of choice and open a Xamarin Android project. You should see a device listed something like: emulator-5554 When prompted, enter your Mac admin username and password to open a connection from your Windows VM to OS X.Ĭonfirm that your Mac emulator device has been picked up by entering the following command: You will be presented with a command line console. From here add two forwarding configurations. Select Connection > SSH > Tunnels from the Category panel on the left side of the PuTTY SSH Client.

Make sure SSH is selected under Protocol.

Leave the Port set to its default (should be 22).

In the Host Name (or IP Address) field, enter the IP Address of you Mac (found at: System Preferences > Sharing).

Select Session from the Category panel on the left.

Start your Windows VM in Parallels Desktop

Navigate to the platform-tools directory of your Android SDK: yourandroidsdkdirectory/platform-tools If you'd like to try those out: open the SDK Manager, download the x86 images, then configure devices in the AVD Manager to use the x86 images instead of the ARM images.Įdit a device in the AVD Manager to use an x86 image instead of an ARM image Press LaunchĮarlier, we installed HAXM which allows the use of the Intel x86 images which run much faster than their ARM counterparts. the Launch Options dialog will appear.Navigate to the tools directory of your Android SDK: yourandroidsdkdirectory/tools To view the configured devices, start the AVD Manager: For the sake of this tutorial, we'll use one of those devices which use ARM images. Several AVDs came pre-configured when you installed the Android SDK. Leave the other options set to their defaults. System Preferences > Sharing > Enable Remote Login If you don't do this, when you launch an Intel x86 emulator image, your entire computer will freeze up forcing you to perform a hard reboot. This step is necessary if you plan on creating custom AVDs that leverage the much faster Intel x86 images.ĭo you use OS X Mavericks + Parallels Desktop 9 ? In short, it speeds up Android app emulation on Intel host machines. Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager. You should end up with an SDK directory somewhere on your Mac with subdirectories like: extras, platform tools, tools, etc.

Nothing can get done until the Android SDK is installed, so let's start there.

Parallels Desktop running a Windows 8 VM.

Many thanks to James Montemagno for pointing me to Paul Batum's post on the Xamarin forum. If you've been looking for a way to develop your Xamarin Android apps in a Parallels Desktop Windows VM, but run the app in an Android emulator on your Mac, this post is an attempt to distill the information from across multiple sites to get you started.

Android emulator for mac