A few months back we released Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.1 (VSTU), the first release to be natively supported by Unity on Windows, making it much easier for game developers to use the rich capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE while developing Unity games.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the VSTU 2.2 release that fixes common integration issues that developers are facing.

You can download VSTU directly from Visual Studio or from the Visual Studio Gallery:

• Visual Studio 2015 Tools for Unity
• Visual Studio 2013 Tools for Unity
• Visual Studio 2012 Tools for Unity
• Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Unity

Main changes

• The VSTU installer properly installs all the information that Unity looks for before enabling the native VSTU support.
• For Unity on OS X with and Visual Studio in a virtual machine, Visual Studio properly detects and debugs Unity on the host.
• For Unity 4.6, VSTU properly generates references to UnityEngine and UnityEditor.
• The C# language version is now restricted to C# 4, the latest version of the language supported by Unity.
• Fixed an error in the Unity package that could appear for projects without any script.

And for those of you working on multiplayer games, we’ve added support for the new networking messages in our wizards as shown below. Of course they’re context sensitive, and only appear if you’re actually working in a NetworkBehaviour.

Updating to VSTU 2.2

The easiest way to update is through the update tab of the Visual Studio extension manager. To do it manually, download and install the VSTU version that matches the Visual Studio version you have installed and want to use with Unity, as described in the following sections.

Installing VSTU 2.2

Unity 5.2 or above

VSTU is natively supported and you just need to reinstall VSTU. In this scenario, you don’t need to import the VSTU package in your project, and you should delete the UnityVS folder of your project if you were using VSTU with a previous version of Unity. The solution we generate won’t be prefixed by UnityVS.

Just set Visual Studio to be the external editor in Unity:

And you’ll see that the VSTU support is enabled in the About window of Unity as shown below.

Unity 5.1 or below

You’ll still need to reimport our package in your project. The solution we generate will still be prefixed by UnityVS.

We strongly encourage VSTU users to update to 2.2. VSTU works best with the native support that was released with Unity 5.2, but we continue to support game developers on previous versions of Unity through the use of our VSTU Unity package. The full change log for this release is in our documentation.

As always, if you have any suggestion for the Visual Studio Tools for Unity, please post them on UserVoice, and if you encounter any issue please report it through the Visual Studio Connect site.

Jb Evain (@jbevain), Software Engineering Manager, Visual Studio Platform Team Jb runs the Visual Studio Tools for Unity experience for the Visual Studio Platform team. He joined Microsoft last year 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 the last decade.