Microsoft acquires SyntaxTree, creator of UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio
Game developers build the apps that hundreds of millions of users play every day across a wide variety of devices, from Xbox and Windows to iOS, Android and the Web. Games are the most popular application type on every major mobile platform, and Windows has long been a great home for desktop gaming. For developers, Visual Studio has been one of the most heavily used tools for game development across the industry, used by big game studios and indie developers alike.
Over the last 10 years, the Unity cross-platform game engine has grown to become a widely used rendering engine and tool for game developers targeting desktop, consoles, mobile devices and the web, with over 2 million developers now using Unity for game development. Unity offers great support for targeting or porting to Windows, across Windows desktop, Windows Store and Windows Phone.
Today, I'm pleased to announce that we are acquiring SyntaxTree, the developers of the UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio.
UnityVS enables Unity developers to take advantage of the productivity of Visual Studio to author, browse and debug the code for their Unity applications. Already today, dozens of the biggest names in game development rely on Visual Studio and the UnityVS plugin.
With this acquisition, we have the opportunity to integrate this support for Unity even more deeply into Visual Studio, and to continue to push forward Visual Studio's support for game developers. Microsoft will also make the existing UnityVS plugin available for free on our download site shortly.
[EDIT 7/29/2014: Visual Studio Tools for Unity 1.9 is now available for download]
In today's mobile-first, cloud-first world, Visual Studio provides a great development environment for game developers targeting the breadth of mobile devices, and connecting to the rich services platforms in Azure.
I am excited about our opportunity to continue to push game development with Visual Studio forward with the help of the SyntaxTree team.
Namaste!
Comments
Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Great news guys! I started learning Unity and I was really disappointed that I couldn't debug with VS.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
AWESOME!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Congrat!!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Thank You! MonoDevelop was such a chore to use with Unity. Now go buy Unity ;)Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Thank you so much for this! MonoDevelop was such a chore to use. Great to see UnityVS will be free.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
where is the download link :D ??Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Any plans to make UnityVS work on free versions of Visual Studio as well?Anonymous
July 02, 2014
This is great news indeed. I purchased UnityVS about six months ago because I dearly wanted to use Visual Studio for debugging, but was ultimately quite disappointed in UnityVS. It did allow debugging my Unity app code in Visual Studio, but was not well integrated, had an intrusive workflow, and just wasn't the seamless experience I'd hoped it would be. Having better integration with Visual Studio and support from Microsoft may make this plugin really shine. I'll never give up Visual Studio, as it's the best development environment available bar none, but it will be great to not have to load up Monodevelop anymore just to debug a thorny issue.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
YESSSSSSAnonymous
July 02, 2014
@Takuan Daikon I’m sorry you didn’t have a great experience with the existing UnityVS plugin. We’re really excited about the core technology and the team that brought it to life and when we talked with each other about how we want to make it better, the kinds of issues you’re raising were frequent in our discussion. If you’re interested, you can contact me offline and we can talk more about specific issues you’re running into. My email is johnmont@microsoft.comAnonymous
July 02, 2014
@Igor It's not up yet. As we transition the software from SyntaxTree to Microsoft there are some changes we want to make, mostly minor fix-ups to the license, logo, and so on to reflect the fact that UnityVS is now a Microsoft product. It’s not a lot of work, but we won’t release until we’ve gotten those things done, and then we’ll publish the download linkAnonymous
July 02, 2014
@Marcos When we re-release the plugin we will make UnityVS itself free for download on the VS Professional and higher SKUs. We’re still discussing what the best path is for this technology as we integrate it more deeply into Visual Studio. Once we have a clear decision, we’ll publish it.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
This is great news. After 5 minutes in Monodevelop, I gladly purchased UnityVS. I can't imagine Unity development without it.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Next, get Azure Mobile services working with Unity3d.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Great plugin, great news. Despite the fact it suffered from some workflow issues, I saved many hours on code debugging. I can't wait for upcoming updates of UnityVS!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
UnityVS is now free available ?? for integrate with UNITY ??Anonymous
July 02, 2014
We don't want Unity, we want XNA!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
What about using C# for Xbox One (without Unity of course - we need generic support)? Are you getting any close? Sony already allows this for PS4 via MonoGame. Please match it with MonoGame funding and proper support.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
This is so great. Will you support also older VS versions? I am currently using VS 2010 Ultimate?Anonymous
July 02, 2014
>>Next, get Azure Mobile services working with Unity3d. Dear N, Our friends at BitRave developed Unity 3d plugin for Mobile Services: www.bitrave.com/azure-mobile-services-for-unity-3d Would love to hear your thoughts on it.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Nice... time to get some work done :)Anonymous
July 02, 2014
@Ingo UnityVS today supports VS 2010 and later. When we re-release the plugin (soon), we intend to keep supporting 2010 and higher.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Brilliant news - thank youAnonymous
July 02, 2014
great :) time to get some work doneAnonymous
July 02, 2014
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July 02, 2014
This is great news - unfortunately for me I purchased a license yesterday....so I'm a bit annoyed. But I'm happy to see better integration.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
being a licensee of UnityVS I feel this can hopefully bring about a great integration... live long and prosper! lolAnonymous
July 02, 2014
Fantastic :)Anonymous
July 02, 2014
@Den This question came up on our UserVoice site as well and we answered it there, too: As was tweeted by @joebelfiore during BUILD2014, support for C# development will be coming to Xbox. Please stay tuned for more information. visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../4233646-allow-net-games-on-xbox-oneAnonymous
July 02, 2014
This is cool! UnityVS is already a pretty awesome tool but closer access to the VS team and the ability to integrate more deeply can only be a good thing. Thinking beyond Unity, though - this means Microsoft now owns a debug interface to the Mono runtime (albeit a rather old and hacked-up one). Any thoughts on whether this might eventually turn into a more general 'debug Mono-runtime apps with VS' feature?Anonymous
July 02, 2014
@John Montgomery [MSFT] I have always had deep respect for the UnityVS team, and have always thought UnityVS had tremendous potential despite my personal frustrations with it. I am actually quite excited by the prospect of better integration with Visual Studio, and can't wait to see how UnityVS evolves with this change. After the current sprint is over and I have a little more breathing room, I'll try to compile a summary of my experiences with UnityVS that I'll pass along.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
This is awesome!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Great news!!!! Visual studio will be more interesting now with this feature for gamedevAnonymous
July 02, 2014
Great news. Now buy Xamarin, please!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
perfectAnonymous
July 02, 2014
ITs AWESOME, GOOD WORKAnonymous
July 02, 2014
Ну ахуеть теперь жешAnonymous
July 02, 2014
awesome ,good workAnonymous
July 02, 2014
glad to hear it support all unity languages for debugging.Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Really disappointed at all the emphasis that is being put onto Unity at the moment. I tried Unity when XNA was deprecated, and just couldn't get on with the fact that rather than coding up my game and being fully in control, I was effectively just dragging and dropping objects into a game world, then tweaking scripts to make them do stuff. Needless to say, I dropped Unity after two weeks of struggling upon discovering Monogame. There are loads of ex-XNA developers out there, and a lot of them want a programming framework to develop games with, rather than a game engine. Just look at the Visual Studio user voice site - XNA 5 is currently the top request by a considerable margin (visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../top) I'm not saying "drop Unity for Monogame" by any stretch of the imagination - but give us developers who want to program games some certainty about the future, please!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Well done Microsoft!Anonymous
July 02, 2014
Very good news! If only MonoDevelop could disappear forever now...Anonymous
July 02, 2014
great! i hope we can see an even better integration the amazing visual studio with unity and maybe finally a vb.net syntax support!Anonymous
July 03, 2014
This is amazing news!Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Can you guys also buy Unity and update its engine to use the real .NET? :)Anonymous
July 03, 2014
I know you guys probably don't know an exact date when you will re-release this plugin, but are we talking days, weeks, or months? I am trying to get my team away from Monodevelop since I use UnityVS at home. We were just about to buy UnityVS when the download link vanished.Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Looking forward to the download link . Cheers :)Anonymous
July 03, 2014
I love this tool, It is a welcome event that Microsoft plucked this gem to make it part of its offering :-)Anonymous
July 03, 2014
@Mike If I were you, I'd be thinking weeks, not months. Like you, we all want it back as quickly as we can make it happen. JohnAnonymous
July 03, 2014
Neat! Now if MS could just buy us all a Unity license as well ;)Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Very nice (even though I'm not an Unity developer).Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Great news!Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Great!Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Too bad I just forked out $99 for the plugin a week before this announcement... I'm gathering MS will make this available for free to licensed Visual Studio usersAnonymous
July 03, 2014
Does this mean that the plugin will be available to VS Express too? It would be nice if that is the case.Anonymous
July 03, 2014
Thanks for valuable post..........Anonymous
July 04, 2014
Fantastic news, thanks for doing this. "Microsoft will also make the existing UnityVS plugin available for free on our download site shortly." When is shortly? I'm eager to get started with this, and not sure which download site you're referring to.Anonymous
July 04, 2014
Oh, i've recently bought it. =( But good news, of course.Anonymous
July 05, 2014
Great news! Thanks!Anonymous
July 06, 2014
This is fantastic news! However, I'm currently on the 14-day trial of UnityVS, due to expire tomorrow :( I was all geared up to purchase a licence. Is there anything I can do to keep using it before the official release?Anonymous
July 07, 2014
greats...sounds good ...Anonymous
July 09, 2014
Define "shortly" =)Anonymous
July 10, 2014
@GarethPW, @Drew Markovitch The short answer is a couple of weeks. We're working as fast as we can and checking off a last few things release as a Microsoft product. JohnAnonymous
July 11, 2014
When can I start downloading it??Anonymous
July 12, 2014
WOOP YEAH :DAnonymous
July 13, 2014
Great stuff, I am always happy to see Microsoft embrace gaming, as it's certainly been key to success for many, Microsoft included - and this integration will definitely give me more reasons to have Visual Studio open instead of alternatives! However, I disagree with the comments about either Microsoft acquiring Unity, or pushing for .NET in Unity.
- Cross platform is the reason Unity is popular over other alternative - lose this, and you lose a fair amount of developers. And as much as I love Microsoft's various platforms, I also love Apple, the various free-range Linux distributions, and even more "fringe" OSes - there's enough love in my heart for them all.
- No one willingly wants to maintain multiple code trees, it's usually forced either due to financial survival needs or legacy support requirements - so as nice as native .NET is, it would be another reason to abandon Unity for an alternate cross platform solution.
Anonymous
July 13, 2014
Is there an ETA on when UnityVS will be available for download? The word "Shortly" was used but that was nearly two weeks ago.Anonymous
July 14, 2014
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July 14, 2014
Great! I really love UnityVS and I hope you'll make it so it can be run on the free versions of Visual Studio. I hope you buy Xamarin next! That would be really awesome! Their products are far too expensive and they really need a big company to back them up and shape up the product...Anonymous
July 15, 2014
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July 18, 2014
any update when it will be available for download? // chall3ng3r //Anonymous
July 19, 2014
3 weeks till now, "shortly" is fading away!Anonymous
July 19, 2014
can i buy the current version anywhere if I don't want to wait until the free version is available?Anonymous
July 20, 2014
Come on already! It's been almost a month! How is that "Shortly"?! You could have saved this post till you're all set. I now visit this page everyday hoping to see the download link.Anonymous
July 20, 2014
WHEN WILL THIS BE RELEASED ?Anonymous
July 22, 2014
Eagerly awaiting this, please make this available asap.Anonymous
July 22, 2014
Greetings! This is great news indeed ! I'm as well curious will this be anyhow ever available to express edition users ? If so, it will be a blast !Anonymous
July 22, 2014
@Paul, 53x3, Wessam Fathi, chall3ng3r, James G, Jason A couple of weeks ago, I said UnityVS would be back in a couple of weeks. We’re now just a few days away. I expect early next week we should have bits available. Sorry this is taking longer than I anticipated. JohnAnonymous
July 22, 2014
@Hrcak At present, no. We're going to make the existing UnityVS plugin (which works in VS Pro, Premium, and Ultimate) and make available for free, but right now we're not making it available in an Express product. JohnAnonymous
July 23, 2014
@John Montgomery: Thanks for the reply. So the first thing you're gonna do is 'just' make UnityVS free? I'm just wondering. Are you not going to make any initial improvements? Like for example, there's a 'HUGE' delay when inspecting the value of a SerializedProperty in UnityVS (talking minutes here... VS's gui would hang etc). I talked to UnityVS's support about this and they confirmed it. But they didn't do anything about it! The replication is very easy, write some code that involves a SerializedProperty, debug, hover the mouse over the SP value, and try to collapse the value foldout. Test code: public class TestBehaviour : MonoBehaviour { public string myString; } [CustomEditor(typeof(TestBehaviour))] public class TestEditor : Editor { public override void OnInspectorGUI() { var spMyString = serializedObject.FindProperty("myString"); } } That's just one thing... Not to mention the random skipping of code when 'stepping into', not hitting debug points, crashing Unity, the Unity solution explorer is poor, etc etc. UnityVS was by no mean perfect, very poor integration caused us a lot of headaches. This is why we're all very happy that MS took over finally. We would all love to see those points being improved on. Cheers!
- Vexe
Anonymous
July 24, 2014
@Vexe, Jb from the UnityVS team here, thanks for your feedback. On inspecting a SerializedProperty: we did take this bug report into account and the fix will be in what we ship soon. Most of the issues you describe - stepping missing some lines, breakpoints not being hit, crashes - are usually bugs from Unity's scripting engine and C# compiler. If you can provide me with a way to reproduce them, I'll make sure to verify the bug and pass it along if we can't workaround it. If you have any other issue or suggestion about how to improve the workflow with UnityVS, please get in touch: my email is jbevain@microsoft.com.Anonymous
July 24, 2014
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July 24, 2014
@Jb Evains, Thanks for the reply. I wish I could reproduce those but I can't, since they're pretty random.Anonymous
July 25, 2014
When will UnityVS be available for download again? Or did Microsoft buy this product so they could make sure it never sees the light of day ever again?Anonymous
July 25, 2014
This is great news! I was just about to buy it. Any ideas when it will be available for download?Anonymous
July 26, 2014
@John, thanks for the update. Looking forward to the download in few days :) // chall3ng3r //Anonymous
July 27, 2014
Hopefully we get an update on what is happening soon. Its been almost a month since the acquisition.Anonymous
July 29, 2014
The VS Tools for Unity (formerly UnityVS) are now live. blogs.msdn.com/.../visual-studio-tools-for-unity-1-9.aspx JohnAnonymous
July 29, 2014
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July 29, 2014
The update makes UnityVS unusable. Its not showing anything when I try to open something.Anonymous
July 29, 2014
@James, That's one specific issue! :) The place to report bugs is connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio but as this one is easy I'll just go ahead and answer it right here: It seems Visual Studio's C# compiler is more strict than Unity's. You can make both agree by completing the constraint for R as such: where R : class, TAnonymous
July 29, 2014
@laapsaap well that is strange. Can you make sure to apply the procedure for the migration from 1.8 to 1.9 as described in unityvs.com/.../troubleshooting ? If you're still having the issue after that, my email is jbevain@microsoft.com and I'll help you investigate.Anonymous
July 30, 2014
Awesome job guys! Going to download tonight. I hope UnityVS keeps this add-on updated. // chall3ng3r //Anonymous
August 11, 2014
Great news! I hope the next piece of news is "we bought Xamarin"Anonymous
August 21, 2014
really awesome :)Anonymous
August 28, 2014
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August 29, 2014
I didnt have any problems with Mono, but I guess it's a nice plugin, I have to give it a try some time.Anonymous
September 02, 2014
Much appreciated. Won't say it's perfect, but it's rare indeed that I open MonoDevelop anymore.Anonymous
November 24, 2014
waoooooooooo, bien.Anonymous
January 01, 2015
Great news guys! I started learning Unity and I was really disappointed that I couldn't debug with VS.Anonymous
May 11, 2015
Hi! Do you know how much it costs? I refer to UnityVS Professional . Thanks