Visual Studio Community 2013

Microsoft just made Visual Studio 2013 free to small studios: blog post

No more Visual Studio Express limitations!

Incorporate Visual Studio Tools for Unity (the new version of UnityVS that Microsoft acquired) and you have a really nice development environment.

 

Sorry for the noob question but what are the advantages to using VS over mono develop?

 

It's a more mature development environment. Code completion is better, and in some cases the executable code it generates is a little faster or allocates less heap space (and thus less garbage collection). For example, Mono has a bug that allocates heap space in foreach loops. But, in Mono's favor, it works with Unity right out of the box. VS takes a little extra setup.

 

Ah ok thank. I did see this https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/20b80b8c-659b-45ef-96c1-437828fe7cf2
so I might give it a shot this weekend. No harm to get some experience on VS I guess

 

This is indeed exciting news. To those of you who don't mind spending a little money, I highly recommend the Jetbrains Resharper plugin as well. It works fantastic with Unity/UnityVS.

 

Just wanted to clarify something on TonyLi's post. VS will make zero deference in the compiled code. Unity still compiles the code itself against Mono (it gets a little different if you target Universal, Windows Phone or Windows Store). However, Visual Studio is miles and away better that MonoDevelop. The toolset is richer. The debugging is better (with UnityVS). You'll especially see the benefits when you want to start inspecting the items in collections after setting a breakpoint. Also, once VS 2015 hits you'll be able to use Lambda expressions in your QuickWatch window.

 

Thanks, @Dustin Horne - I often compile DLLs outside of Unity. I forgot to mention that. It applies to compiling DLLs but not building right in Unity.

 

Oh yeah, That makes sense. The IL generated by the native .NET compiler is probably cleaner. I prefer to compile the assemblies in .NET as well. Especially models and things that can be abstracted. Anything that doesn't have a dependency on UnityEngine.dll can easily be unit tested then with MSTest. I haven't dug into it too deeply, but MS Test can't run Unit tests on things that reference UnityEngine.dll for some reason. :/.

 

Ah finally, that will be amazing!!!

 

Installing VS Community has ruined my pc. Im running win 8.1 pro and had a nightmare trying to install. I eventually found out it was some rogue fonts that caused my trouble. I removed them and successfully installed VS. I then installed the VS unity tools. Which seemed to cause unity to hang now on boot up. I now cant start unity or uninstall VS

 

which version of the unity vs tools did you install?

 

Install visual studio 2013 is a nightmare!
1. you need root certificates update for windows. But this cannot be done since our company group policy doesn't allow to do this!
2. After installation, nothing worked! No SDK root was found, nothing compiled for simple c++ test app!
3. spent hours to repair, nothing worked!
4. spent hours to remove.
5 spent hours to restall, but everything was cached!
6 spent hours to clean manually through out the registry
.....

 

I dunno. Installed fine for me first pass. I installed it on a vm. Running visual studio 2013 ultimate on production.

 

not sure your company realizes this, but it's a security update (if I recall) with the root certs... should have been pushed out to workstations ages ago....

 

I'll give it a try, either way I am fine either with Mono or VS

 

Does anyone happen to know of a shader Syntax highlighting Extension for VS?

 

As I know there was no supports shader syntax highlighting for VS till 2013 but I think they have developed something now.
Have a look: http://nshader.codeplex.com/
Hope it helps!
Good Luck