During Microsoft’s developer conference in April of this year, the company highlighted its growing partnerships with leading game engines in the industry. Among Microsoft’s list of named partners were Unreal Engine, Cocos2d, and Unity. Microsoft hopes that with game development support coming from a collaboration with three of the premier independent gaming engine providers, Visual Studio could become the one-stop-shop tool developers would want to use.
Since the announcement, Microsoft and Unity have been working on releases for Visual Studio and as of today, Microsoft has announced the release of Unity 5.2 and Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.1.
According to Microsoft, Visual Studio is the new default Unity scripting editor on Windows. “Starting with Unity 5.2, Unity installer on Windows will now offer to install by default the free Visual Studio Community 2015 and Visual Studio 2015 Tools for Unity.”
As part of the release, there is also native support for Unity for Visual Studio Tools for Unity (VSTU). Developers can now forego importing VSTU packages into each Unity Project. Instead, Unity will automatically pick up VSTU where it is installed, and scripts will open directly in Visual Studio.
Other Unity integration includes cross-platform development using C#. Microsoft has added a new project template in Visual Studio 2015 that installs Unity and the subsequent Visual Studio Tools for developers interested in using C#.
The release also has an update for VSTU 2.0 in the form of Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.1. Septembers update now supports everything required for native VSTU support for to work in Unity 5.2, as well as to incorporate ‘important’ bug fixes, according Microsoft.
Microsoft is encouraging developers to offer suggestions in the UserVoice forums or report any issues through the Visual Studio Connect Site.
