If you're a game developer coming from a Windows or console background (often meaning Visual Studio), Android can be a bit of a culture shock. New tools, new setup, different workflows - it's a lot to take in. And really, a lot of developers that use Visual Studio are less than keen to step away from one of the most powerful IDE's on the market.

Well, now NVIDIA has a potential solution: Nsight Tegra, a brand-new plugin for Visual Studio that gives you a native Android development environment.

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Unlike the last Visual Studio tool we covered, Dot42, which requires you to write your apps in C#, Nsight allows you to write and debug your native Java Android applications right from Visual Studio. Nsight also provides enhanced NEON support, and promises a 10% runtime performance increase for native Android code.

In order to download the Nsight Tegra platform, you'll need to be a registered NVIDIA Developer (free), and apply for the Tegra Registered Developer Program (also free). Once you're approved, you'll be able to download Nsight Tegra as part of the Tegra Android Developer Pack, free of charge.

NVIDIA Blog