Microsoft releases Visual Studio Tools for Unity 3 preview

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by Kareem Anderson 

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Once again, Microsoft’s Connect() conference has born some interesting software release details such as Visual Studio Tool for Unity 3 Preview making its way to developers. For short, VSTU is the “free Visual Studio add-on that enables rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform.”

Developers currently using Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 can now get their hands on the new preview that now:

VSTU 3 focuses on improving on the fundamentals of an IDE: code editing and debugging. The highlights of this release include:

Code Coloration for Unity messages: Unity messages (or event functions) now stand out from other methods in the editor. By default, they’ll be colored like keywords, but you can change them to your liking. In this screenshot they’re configured to be colored in bright orange.

IntelliSense: VSTU 3 Preview plugs into Visual Studio’s C# IntelliSense engine to provide code completion for Unity messages. Just start declaring a method, and if you’re in a class that supports Unity messages, our IntelliSense will kick-in and show you the list of Unity messages your script can implement.

Improved Expression Evaluator: The expression evaluator is responsible for displaying the values of the Locals and the results of the expressions you input into the Watch and Immediate Window. We’ve improved our expression evaluator to behave closer to the .NET debugger that C# developers know and love.

According to Microsoft’s Visual Studio blog, developers will need to be running Unity 5.4 to run Visual Studio 2017 RC as their script editor and the setup process will have to be manual due to the fact that Unity won’t automatically recognize VS 2017 RC’s installation.

For more on VSTU 3 Preview and 2017 RC installations, we encourage readers to visit the Microsoft Visual Studio blog as soon as possible.

Kareem Anderson

Kareem Anderson Shield

Networking & Security Specialist

Kareem is a journalist from the bay area, now living in Florida. His passion for technology and content creation drives are unmatched, driving him to create well-researched articles and incredible YouTube videos. He is always on the lookout for everything new about Microsoft, focusing on making easy-to-understand content and breaking down complex topics related to networking, Azure, cloud computing, and security.