Most likely the built in debugging features will save you much more than 1% of your time.

Yeah and the pro version is free to students, but the ultimate version is amazing.

The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning.

Software somehow being better because it's free is only true when your a hobbyist, in the professional world it's a lie.

Yes but the integration isn't very good for a lot of the free software. And the time saved with well integrated software is well worth the pitifully small cost.

Hmm. I was sleepy, so I guess I misread "simulator" as "emulator". I suspect that the integration then is just not fully developed.
Visual Studio / XBox seems to be a different situation, because the XBox is actually a full computer, running an entire operating system. Clearly, Microsoft has built some kind of harness for remote debugging into the XBox operating system (good idea, there), and Google hasn't yet done that (or it isn't being used, or whatever).

I can't help but disagree - Eclipse has much better integration with more technologies then any proprietary IDE I've heard of. Your experiences with Android seem to be a fault with your particular setup as remote debugging works just fine with Eclipse (used it plenty).

It is an emulator, but it was not deployed to a device. Although it doesn't even show the stack trace when it crashes on the connected device, which is also a full computer running an entire operating system.



Eclipse has integration with more things, not better integration. A proprietary IDE that has all the tools built in is usually better integrated than a free technology which allows add-ons. I followed the set-up instructions exactly for setting up the android framework, it just dumps the error messages into logcat.

I did not use the command line to run the app lol, I used Eclipse and pressed the debug button, which loaded up the emulator (if not already running) installed the app, and then if the app crashed, it said the app has quit, and log cat shows the stack trace. That's it, doesn't jump to the problematic line or anything.

Yes that is precisely the problem md, I don't know before hand where to place the breakpoints, until it crashes and I look at the log cat. Then it's fairly obvious what the issue is and doesn't require looking at the variable state usually, but if it did, it'd require me to put a breakpoint where it crashed, and have it only run on the condition that it does crash (for instance if a function is called several times with different parameters and only one set makes it crash) and then run the debugger again and get to the part that makes it crash.

In visual studio when it crashes it simply breaks at that line, which makes it faster to debug, and does not require me to know the exact condition that makes something crash to put a breakpoint there.