Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

I find it amazing that it took me this long to figure this one out, but here it is: if one is developing on Visual Studio, bypassing the F5 and just testing directly on the site will knock between 1 second to or 5 per test. This is especially useful if it is very apparent whether the change has worked or not by testing the functionality.

It doesn't seem like a lot, but those 5 seconds build up after repeated iterations. Also, those 5 seconds can be enough to break your concentration on what are you looking for, meaning that the true time lost could be greater is we take into account the seconds needed to refocus on the task.

By testing it this way, we only incurred the time penalty of starting the debugger when we actually need to step through the code or to debug per se.

So when the change will work or not, avoid the debugger: build and test, build and test.

So here are the instructions on opening existing projects into Eclipse.

If you are a Visual Studio developer you are here because you can't open an existing project in Eclipse. You are probably 5 minutes away from giving up on eclipse and tweeting about how Eclipse sucks.

I was there too.

And then, after attempting it again and again, I finally figured it out. I am going to translate opening an existing project from Eclispese into Visual Studioese here. Think about these two IDEs as cars: Visual Studio is an automatic, eclipse is manual transmission.

There are two things you got to know:

A) Workspace = Solution
B) You got to set it by hand

I don't normally don't think about the solution because Visual Studio lovingly just creates one for me. If I need to add projects to it, it can be done easily. It makes me happy; it has made you happy too. When it comes to creating solution and project spaces, Visual Studio is like an automatic car: it just does it for you.

But in eclipse you got to do it by hand. Maybe there is a plugin that will make it behave like Visual Studio, but in most distributions you will have to do it manually. It is not hard, but you got to do it. On this issue, eclipse is like a manual transmission car: you got to know and be aware of different gears and when to switch them.

So let's learn how to drive stick by learning how to set up your workspace/solution and how to add existing projects to it:

Create a new workspace by clicking
File -> Switch Workspaces -> Other

Browse to where you want your workspace (solution) folder to live in, where you have the existing project folder. This is the equivalent of Add Project in Visual Studio.

Add a project to the workspace by clicking
File-> Import-> General-> Import Existing Projects into Workspace

And navigate to the existing project root folder.

And you are done.

Now let's learn how to switch gears. In Visual Studio you will have your landing page with a list of previous projects. When you click on the project, the solution automatically switches. That is our automatic car. With our stick vehicle, to switch from one workspace(solution) to another you do it by clicking

File -> Switch Workspaces -> >>Select workspace that you want to go to<<

Remember, you got to manually change the workspace(solution). Attempting to switch solutions in the Visual Studio way, that is, by "opening" another project via project import, will result into adding that project into the workspace, not into an automatic workspace switch.

References:
I found the specific instructions on how to open an existing project on this book Android Application Development, 1st. Edition