May 10th, 2018

Visual Studio and Unity 2018.1, even better together

Jb Evain
Principal Software Engineering Manager

The Visual Studio team is excited about the Unity 2018.1 release: It’s the start of a new release cycle packed with great new features like the Scriptable Render Pipeline and the C# Job System. You can read the full blog post by Unity for all the details on what’s new in the 2018.1 release.

First and foremost, we’re thrilled Unity chose Visual Studio as the default editor for both Windows and macOS so that developers get the same great editing and debugging experience in Visual Studio across PC and Mac. With this new release, Visual Studio for Mac is now included in the installer, instead of MonoDevelop on a Mac.

Download and Install Unity dialog showing Visual Studio for Mac

With this release, the Unity scripting runtime now also supports .NET 4.6 APIs and C# 6 by default. This gives you access to modern .NET libraries, SDKs, and tools. All Visual Studio products are already fully compatible with the new runtime for development and debugging.

Configuration dialog showing Unity scripting runtime now also supports .NET 4.6 APIs and C#6 by default

On top of this, additional features are supported thanks to the new runtime:

  • You can set the next statement while debugging (Ctrl+⇧+F10 on Windows, ⌘+⇧+F10 on macOS).
  • Improved support for evaluation (especially for generics, nullables, and collections).
  • Support for DebuggerHidden and DebuggerStepThrough attributes.
  • Better debugging performance and stability.

As you can see in the screenshot above, two .NET profiles are now available:

  • The .NET Standard 2.0 profile is your best choice for cross-platform and optimized build size.
  • The .NET 4.x profile gives you access to the full API, suitable for backwards compatibility.

You can learn more about the updated runtime support in this recent Unity blog post.

We’ve worked closely with Unity on this release and we are very pleased that all Unity developers can now benefit from a more reliable and faster programming and debugging experience with Visual Studio!

Author

Jb Evain
Principal Software Engineering Manager

Jb runs the Visual Studio Tools for Unity experience. He has a passion for developer tools and programming languages and enjoys working with game developers.

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