Today the Visual Studio team released the Visual Studio Tools for Unity add-on (formerly known as UnityVS). VSTU is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform. This is our first release since the acquisition of SyntaxTree, and we’re excited to have the opportunity to reach to the Unity community with Visual Studio.

It is now available for download on the Visual Studio Gallery at the following links:

Visual Studio Tools for Unity 1.9

Here are the highlights in today’s 1.9 release:

  • Faster debugger. Attaching and detaching the debugger as well as expanding local variables is now faster.
  • Faster startup. Opening VSTU projects is now faster.
  • Better handling of C# constructs. The local variables window is now properly populated when debugging iterators or when variables are accessed inside closures.
  • Start your game and your debugging session in one click. This feature is one of our most-requested: you can now attach the debugger and start the game by simply changing the debug target. This is only available in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

And many more new features and bug fixes as you can see in our changelog. If you have any suggestion for VSTU, please post them on UserVoice, and if you encounter any issue please report them through the Visual Studio Connect site.