using Visual Studio Community 2013 (Free) with Unity

An article by mgear    6 Comments

“Visual Studio Community 2013 A Full-Featured IDE – FREE” (link)

Some notes what it took to make it work (was pretty easy)

Installing Visual Studio Community 2013 (FREE!)
–    Download: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs
–    Install (you can leave out those extras)
–    Restart
–    Start visual studio
–    Sign in
–    [x] Create visual studio online account (optional, but could be useful later,  more info: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-studio-online-vs.aspx , free for 5 users)
–    Development settings: General
–    Color scheme: Dark (well anything works)
–    Can close it now
–    Start Unity
–  ** You dont need to do these next steps if you will install VS Tools also **
–    Go to Edit / Preferences / External Tools
–    External script editor, click “browse..” from the dropdown
–    Find Visual Studio Community exe, default location is at: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe
–    Test opening some script
–    Yay it works! (and even clicking error codes in console takes you to the correct line)

**

VS TOOLS FOR UNITY (previously UnityVs, so you can use Debugging and maybe there are other benefits also??)
–    Download (I took 2013 version: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/20b80b8c-659b-45ef-96c1-437828fe7cf2 (or check http://unityvs.com/ )
–    Then copy “Visual Studio 2013 Tools.unitypackage” from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Unity\2013\” into your Unity Standard packages folder (so that its easy to import)
–    Standard Packages folder is usually somewhere like “C:\Program Files (x86)\Unity4\Editor\Standard Packages\” (It contains the other unity standard packages also)
–    You need to restart unity for it to show up in the Import Package list
–    Done!

**

FINAL TEST & DEBUGGING
–    Start Unity
–    Import “Visual Studio 2013 Tools.unitypackage” (right click in Project window, Import Package / Visual Studio 2013 Tools”
–    New Menu item appears: Visual Studio Tools
–    Menu: Visual Studio Tools / Generate Project Files (not sure what it does, but why not..)
–    Menu: Visual Studio Tools / Configuration
–    Activate [x] Open scripts with Visual Studio
–    Now open some script by double clicking it
–    Visual Studio Community should open (for me it didn’t open the script on first run, had to double click script file again)
–    Now Debugging should work: In Visual Studio, select menu: Debug  / Attach Unity Debugger
–    Then select unity instance (displays the project name)
–    Insert breakpoint somewhere in code (by clicking the left border of script editor window, left side to line numbers)

*To enable line numbers in VS, type “line numbers” (without quotes) in the Quick Launch search box, then enable [x] Line numbers from that settings page

**

TODO/Missing:
– Scripting API keywords search on keypress (like in monodev)
– ctrl+D for duplicate line (like in uniscite)