After creating an Android application using the great Xamarin tools, it was finally time to do some intensive testing on the Android emulator. When starting to test I noticed something really annoying, I had to type everything through the onscreen keyboard and couldn’t use the physical keyboard on my development machine.
Fixing this is easy by changing the settings of a specific emulator device:
- Open the AVD Manager.
- Select an emulator device.
- Click on Edit… to edit the properties of this device. The Edit AVD window is loaded.
- In the Hardware section, click on New... A list is loaded with all the properties you can configure.
- In the Property drop-down list, select Keyboard Support and press OK.
- This add the property in the hardware list.
- Click on the value column and change it to "yes".
- Click on "Edit AVD" once again to save your changes.