You may now say 'I told you so'...

I downloaded Unity 5.3 the other day. The installer managed to sneak in installing Visual Studio and setting it up as my default code editor.

Anyway today I decided I was about ready to actually start writing some code in 5.3. I opened the editor. And visual studio pops up. Being generally lazy I decide to give it a go, rather then take the 30 seconds to google how to get MonoDevelop to come back.

I was pleasantly surprised. The IDE was pretty easy to pick up. It seems to know what I want. And it seems to have this general ability to ignore typos as I make them. Plus it seems to integrate with Unity far better then MonoDevelop ever did. Console errors, warnings and debugs are right there in the IDE with me. Compile error messages are pointed out directly as I make them. Tool tips are everywhere. There is even the little light bulb that pops up and points out possible problems.

Anyway, after a couple hours of coding I'm now hooked. I apologize profusely for every time I said MonoDevelop was more then enough to meet my needs.

 

I told you so

 

6538 posts and NOW he realises!!!!

Sheesh!

/crawls back under rock

 

I'm usually pretty platform agnostic and generally not a windows fanboy even though it is my main development machine. I also have OSX, linux machines, and other OSes and certainly am familiar with all. Microsoft usually has better competitors in most spaces but in IDEs they have always been #1 in my book.

I have always been a huge Visual Studio fan even 15+ years ago. At least for me it has stood the test of time and I've never encountered any IDE that comes close. I've used Eclipse, Xcode, Android Studio, Titanium, command line tools, embedded IDEs (csstudio or IAR workbench), lighter text editors, Borland, etc. It was worth it even back in the day when the free version didn't have all the features that community does (community I find just as good as the paid version that my previous employer always provided). To be honest debugging has always been the main portion of VS that sets it apart from the rest it was always reliable whether I was debugging over the network or local it seemed to be much more solid than the alternatives.

 

I dont haz space for da VS. :'(

 

VS snuck up on me too. I've maybe written 5 lines of code in so far. As I've mentioned in the past, a particularly difficult client just has me seriously burnt out on coding right now. I can barely stand to look at Unity. So my past few weeks have been spent creating graphics. As of now, I don't hate VS, but I don't like it either. I simply don't have enough experience to say. I tend to find IDEs mostly the same. Some are better than others. I like XCode better than Monodevelop. But they all suffer from that annoyance that autocomplete is super terrific when it helps you and super annoying when it hinders you. Unless VS does something particularly egregious I'll probably stay with it. Mostly because I'm too lazy to figure out how to switch back. Hopefully it will pleasantly surprise me too.

My opinion may not matter much though. Until 2009 when I had to use XCode, I refused to use any IDE. I was a text editor and command line kinda guy. Since then, I do appreciate some of what IDEs do. But, like auto complete, it all seems hit or miss.

 

Sometimes you don't realize that ramen noodles aren't so great until you eat a nice steak.

 

Me not understanding VS and not getting it to work with C++ for UE4 was the reason I tried unity. Would be a bit ironic if I switched to VS now, but it is a possibility. C# seemed to work back then. Can anyone tell me how easy it is to switch back to Mono if VS doesn't work out for me? If I know I can get back then I'll give VS a go too.

 

Isn't switching between editors as simple as changing what to open scripts with in preferences?

 

I informed you thusly.

 

Edit->Preferences->External Tools->External Script editor

 

I told you so.

 

Well, looks like I need to change over too.

 

Aside from an issue where I can't seem to get .net 3.5 to work (I need to reformat and reinstall windows 7 because something is corrupt and I don't know if I even have a key), the only problems I'm having are VS formatting code behind my back (like turning tabs into spaces) and the fact that it's 2015 and it still can't figure out to use whatever line ending is already there.

 

It also have awesome syntax color themes for all of the .Net languages.

 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/66d2abf2.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

 

The key is stored under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version] as ProductId.

If you're unable to boot Windows then you can use the registry editor on the Windows 7 install disc.

http://blog.computerservicepros.com/?p=24

 

Thank you! Now I can finally find out which of the licenses that I have I need to use for a reinstall. I was fearing I might run into problems if by accident I run the same license on 2 computers simultaneously.

 

Actually I had somewhat similar problems when I tried to use VS for C#.
There's one unfixable auto-formatting option that can't be turned off, and VS routinely messes up line endings. In the end I decided to stick with monodevelop, despite monodevelop being a buggy mess.

VS is still #1 IDE for C++, though, despite microsoft's continuous attempts to ruin it.

 

I still keep monodevelop around, its built in assembly browser is more useful.. not sure why visual studio has such a useless alternative.

 

you really only just used vs?

I guess its like saying blender is as good as 3dsmax. While you havnt used max, this is true.

 

Pretty sure that has to be used per file and just dictates a policy that auto-formats all the endings. It still doesn't have an option to use whatever is already there.

Sadly doesn't work out for me. Tried a bunch of options to convert it, but nothing actually gives me a CD key back. I assume it's because it's from a bulk license from back in school, and those licenses are even weirder than OEMs.

Yeah, I've run across some oddities like a panel (might even be the Unity project panel) where there is a button (might be just opening it) that seems to format the entire file selected.

 

My go to hot key combos:

Code Formatting: Ctrl-H Ctrl-D
Go To Definition: Right Click or F12
Find All References: Right Click or Ctrl-K, R
Quick Actions: the light bulb that shows up or Right Click or Ctrl-.
Rename: Right Click or F2
Toggle Bookmark: Ctrl-B, T
Next Bookmark: Ctrl-B, N
Previous Bookmark: Ctrl-B, P

 

Does anyone here use sublime text?

 

For your tab/space problems, make sure to check here:
Tools -> Options

 

Already had done that. Something I/it was doing had reformatted some files without any regard for what the settings were.

 

For formatting (indention, braces, wrapping, etc.) take a look at this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cdnstudents...dio-tips-and-tricks-formatting-your-code.aspx

 

Very odd. I've only had problems with Unity putting unix style endings on my files from time to time.

 

Sounds pretty sweet, I haven't used VS in years. I would love to try, but I can't bring myself to downgrade my OS to support it.

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/vs-code-unity-debugger-extension-preview.369775/
For any platform AFAIK.

 

Well.. now...
Thanks! Downloading now.

 

How long till that's part of the Unity installer too?

 

Have there been improvements to the VS integration in Unity 5.3 compared to 5.2?

I ran into a problem starting in 5.0 (and now in 5.2) where VS would lock up randomly for 10-60 seconds in the middle of typing code. It was so bad I had to switch to MonoDevelop (the horror!). It may be something going on with Visual Studio rather than Unity, I don't know.

 

IIRC VisualStudio (in C#) mode had this problem where you couldn't prevent it from adding space after ")" into "){", if auto formatting was enabled. As far as I know there wasn't any option for that. That does not happen in C++ mode.

Another issue is that pasting text from external programs often resulted in CRLF/LF ending mix, regardless of project settings.

 

I've had no issues with integration so far. Admittedly that's only a couple of hours in. It seems to be better integrated then MonoDevelop was. Output to the Unity console also appears in the VS console.

 

Those required external plugins - it's all native now and fixed up. I've not had any problems. For windows users, there's not much point to anything else. You can also debug shaders.

 

I've been telling people for years - Visual Studio is by far the best compiler/editor/IDE on the planet. Nothing else really does compare.

 

Awww man, looks like I'll have to switch to VS as well now that all the cool kids are using it

 

No, it is not. Choice of the best IDE depends on the language. The best for the C++, sure. Not sure about the rest of languages though. Plug in prolog code, see what happens.

 

This is always true, certain languages can be locked in (exclusive) or much stronger on certain IDEs (ie. swift on Xcode). It's pretty obvious in the context of Unity we're talking about C# mainly and perhaps some native dll creation (c++).

But yes on the languages that VS supports (ie. C++, C#, VB.net, etc.) I have yet to find a better experience.

 

Did you know that you can open and manipulate even FBX-files in Visual Studio?

I stumbled over that feature lately. I'm not sure if it's really useful but it was one of these Wow experiences ;-) . I'm working since years with Visual Studio and didn't know that you can do this.

 

Huh. Can't be much worse then getting my head around the blender UI.

 

Common, now we know you're lying. No one has every got their head around the blender UI.

 

There is an extension available for Arity Prolog.

https://github.com/sebagomez/vsprolog

I knew you could view them but until I tried searching for a model editing extension in VS I didn't know it could model too.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh873114.aspx

 

Well, I don't know. I use it daily for C++ code, but last time I tried it with C#, the whole "Let's insert space into ){ just because we can" thing got on my nerves quickly. Prior to 2015 VS had serious trouble correctly detecting file encodings too (basically, editor could detect utf8 without bom, while compiler couldn't).

Haven't tested it, but I don't see any mention of integrating with prolog's "command prompt". I.e. running query, etc.

VS today includes a lot of bloat, and takes its sweet time to start up. Honestly, i liked 2008 version more. Smaller, faster, and with less nonsense.

You don't use the UI, you use hotkeys.

 

...Told you so.

Visual Studio is just better than MonoDevelop. The interface is more refined. There are more and better tools to write quality code quickly and efficiently. The tools that have been included in 5.3 have really sealed the difference for me - I like how, now, you don't have to worry about syncing projects, you just 'Open Solution' and start working on game code.

 

Is Visual Studio size really 11GB? It needs 11 GB to be installed. Srs? I wanna try that out but can hardly manage to get this much data cleaned.

 

The built-in integration was actually added in 5.2. I will surely try 5.3 after a couple of 5.3.x versions to see if that makes a difference. I suppose re-installing VS wouldn't be a terrible idea either.

There's not too much point in using anything other than Visual Studio in Windows, if you can get it to work right.

 

@BoredMormon
And how... install the trial of this and give it a try:
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper

You'll wonder why you never used it before either.