“As part of Visual Studio 2015, developers now get access to the Visual Studio Emulator for Android, a high-performance x86-based emulator for the Android platform that supports a variety of ...

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Emulator for Android was launched only last November. It was the tech company’s attempt at getting developers working on Android apps from their own platform, but it ...

Microsoft developers building software for Android have noticed this, so the company developed its own high-performance Android emulator. That emulator is included with Visual Studio 2015.

The Visual Studio Emulator for Android is a tool within the full Visual Studio 2015 suite, which Microsoft brought to Mac users for the first time back in April.

Visual Studio 2015, the next major release of the popular development IDE from Microsoft, includes improved support for cross-platform device development using C++, an Android emulator for your ...

Microsoft has released the Android Emulator as a standalone download and one does not need to install the bulky Visual Studio package with it.

Microsoft said support for the Android emulator will be coming soon, but didn't give an exact timeframe. Mac users can sign-up to be notified when it's available from the Visual Studio website.

Support for Android will be a part of Visual Studio 2015, available now as a Preview release (download link). The toolchain supports the Clang compiler and LLVM optimizations.

If you're eager to give it a try, download and install Visual Studio 2015 RC. Be sure to enable the option for "Microsoft Visual Studio Emulator for Android" during the setup process.

Blimey if that emulator is anything like the Windows Phone Hyper-V one it will be roughly a billion times better than the QEMU/HAXM one that ADT and Android Studio uses.