Special report: Take the AI & Automation Survey
Wireless

Visual Studio Tools for Unity gets mobile game devs pumped

By Shane Schick Aug 4, 2014 4:11pm

For mobile game developers, the pairing of Unity's tools and Microsoft's Visual Studio is a match made in Heaven, based on their social media reaction.

Late last week Microsoft confirmed that it is offering Visual Studio Tools for Unity, a free add-on that would provide a programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform. This is the first release since Microsoft's acquisition of SyntaxTree. In particular, the company said it now allows developers to start a game and a debugging session in only one click.

A link to an MSDN blog post about Visual Studio Tools for Unity spread quickly on Twitter, with developers eager to share the news with their peers: 

In fact, this was one of those rare instances where even Apple loyalists sounded relatively impressed by a Microsoft move.

There were some who thought the excitement around what are essentially a set of debugging features was reaching nearly insane heights. 

And while Visual Studio Tools for Unity is a great start, Microsoft may still have some ways to go: 

In the meantime, even those working primarily on the Web side may find the combination of Unity and Visual Studio enough to give them the jump-start they need.