Microsoft and Google: When Worlds Collide

I got excited recently when I discovered that Visual studio 2015 integrates xamarin and allows for Cross platform mobile application development.

The excitement is that visual studio is a great IDE and bringing that in for android development, with its amazing intellisense would be incredible. Unfortunately when worlds collide, they either form an amalgamation of greatness, or blow to smithrines. The latter is true in my case.

I dived right into openGL ES project expecting to see the spinning cube demo in the Visual Studio Android emulator.

BOOM, it fell apart. It will not build and initially I couldn't even get the emulator started.

I have not given up on it yet. I have managed to get the emulator working, but the code will not compile. 'Ant' reports an error code 1. Running the ant.bat manually and changing things (eg environmental variables, targets, etc) got it to where it is currently. It will not make an .apk file and tells me:

BUILD FAILED
...\ant\build.xml:538: Unable to resolve project target '$(androidapilevel)'

 If I cannot get it to work, I am switching to Android studio. My message to Microsoft would be: your "out of box" experience that I have so far enjoyed from Visual studio editions has been seriously tarnished. Make sure you get it right before releasing so that people don't have to fiddle with a billion things to get it to work, and that the out of box experience is maintained.