VS 2015 Tooling Update for Unity Game Devs -- Visual Studio Magazine

VS 2015 Tooling Update for Unity Game Devs

Among the changes in Visual Studio 2015 Tools for Unity is a fix for an issue that prevented the abiltity to debug Unity games that incorporated Xamarin. It also incorporates support for Visual Studio 2015 function breakpoints and access to Unity MonoBehaviours.

By Michael Domingo
07/14/2016

The Visual Studio team released an incremental update to its Visual Studio 2015 Tools for Unity. Among the changes in version 2.3 is a number of fixes for debugging issues, especially for those who use Xamarin in conjunction with VSTU.

"VSTU no longer conflicts with the Xamarin tools, preventing you from debug[ging] your Unity game," notes Jb Evain, software engineering manager with Visual Studio, in a blog. Some UserVoice commenters noted that there had been Other improvements: support for VS 2015 function breakpoints, use of text, XML, HTML, and JSON string visualizers while debugging, and fixes for a number of expression evaluation issues from within the debugger.

One other change of note is the ability to access all of Unity's MonoBehaviours from wizards in the VS IDE. MonoBehaviours are Unity's base classes that are used by scripts to attach to a GameObject (a container) within the Unity Editor.

VSTU allows for cross-platform game development with the Unity gaming engine, all while using the full compliment of Visual Studio 2015 environment for building and deploying Unity games.

"VSTU works best with Unity 5.3 where it's natively supported, but we continue to support game developers on previous versions of Unity through the use of our VSTU Unity package," said Evain. Developers working with Unity 5.2 only need to reinstall this version, while those using Unity 5.2 will need to reimport it into projects.

VSTU is available via the VS IDE extension manager or in the VS Gallery.

About the Author

Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.

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