Today we release Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2. VSTU is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform.
The main feature of Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2 is the official support for Unity 5, the new major version of Unity that was released last month. VSTU is available for download on the Visual Studio Gallery at the following links:
- Visual Studio 2015 Preview Tools for Unity
- Visual Studio 2013 Tools for Unity
- Visual Studio 2012 Tools for Unity
- Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Unity
The support for Unity 5 aside, we continued to focus on bringing more features from the Visual Studio debugger to VSTU. The highlights of VSTU 2.0 Preview 2 include:
Option panel for VSTU: We’re always working on bringing new features to VSTU. Using our option panel you can enable or disable them depending on your use cases.
Experimental support for breaking on exceptions: The ability to break the debugger when an exception happens in your Unity code is a common feature request. You’ll currently need to enable this experimental feature in our option panel, then you’ll be able to use the new Exception Settings window to configure which exception you want to break on.
Function Breakpoints: VSTU now supports creating function breakpoints. A good use case for those are when you want to put a breakpoint in every MonoBehaviour message in your game code, without having to create each breakpoint manually.
Hit Count:hit count breakpoints are a form of conditional breakpoints, where the debugger breaks depending on how many times the breakpoint has been hit while the code is running. This is particularly useful when debugging loops.
Object IDs: If you don’t know about this little gem in the Visual Studio debugger, I invite you to read about it in this blog post on Make Object ID. Basically, object IDs allow you to get a reference to an object even if it’s not in scope.
Our changelog contains many more features and bug fixes. If you have any suggestion for VSTU, please post them on UserVoice, and if you encounter any issue please report it through the Visual Studio Connect site.
 | Jb Evain, Senior Software Engineer, Visual Studio Platform Team (@jbevain) Jb runs the Visual Studio Tools for Unity experience for the Visual Studio Platform team. He recently joined Microsoft as part of the acquisition of SyntaxTree, a company he founded and where he led the development of UnityVS. He has a passion for developer tools and programming languages, and has been working in developer technologies for over a last decade. |