Testing Your Development Environment

The best way to make sure you correctly configured your development environment is to take an existing Android application and run it. You can do this easily by using one of the sample applications provided as part of the Android SDK in the samples subdirectory found where your Android SDK is installed.

Within the Android SDK sample applications, you can find a classic game called Snake (http://goo.gl/wRojX). To build and run the Snake application, you must create a new Android project in your Eclipse workspace based upon the existing Android sample project, create an appropriate Android Virtual Device (AVD) profile, and configure a launch configuration for that project. After you have everything correctly set up, you can build the application and run it on the Android emulator and on an Android device. By testing your development environment with a sample application, you can rule out project configuration and coding issues and focus on determining if the tools are properly set up for Android development. After this has been established, you can move on to writing and compiling your own applications.