Debugging in Unity (C#) + Visual Studio Code Work on OS X?

Question

I really like the idea of working with Visual Studio, C# and Unity on OS X.

Has anyone made debugging with C# in Unity work with Visual Studio Code on OS X?

Answer 1

An existing Visual Studio solution can be build and debugged with Visual Studio Code on the Mac with Mono. You have to use the launch.json and tasks.json files. I described it on my blog: Compile and Debug

Answer 2

The Unity Debugger for Visual Studio Code is working, but doesn't work well enough when doing any kind of serious work for now. I really hope they will improve it in the future as I prefer VS Code over VS.

Current problems I encountered -Sometimes I cannot step in a function, the debugger will hang until you detach -no local variable, you have to watch everything -some more complex variable have no support, so you can't see what is inside -A bit overall unstable with unexpected behaviours.

What I love about it, Attaching & Detaching is a breeze. Just press a button, allowing to attach and detach quickly as needed. e.g. At the beginning of the program I work on, there will be an bunch of exception. I can detach and attach quickly to skip the exceptions.

The problems with it are too constraining as it currently stands, I had to go back to the classic Visual Studio.

Answer 3

[Feb 2017] It is now possible to do this without the dotBunny plugin.

i.e. Support is built into Unity natively.

Just to repeat, you don't need to fiddle with Unity, just VSCode.

Instructions here

Instructions are incomplete though, and I didn't take screenshots (please do!), but basically what I did was:

(...and please improve these instructions as you go, I'm working from memory...)

1. I deleted/renamed my .vscode/Launch.json file, as per the link.
2. Double-click on some file to bring up the project in VSCode (maybe first make sure that in Unity's settings you have selected VSCode as your default code editor)
3. clicking the bug icon then the cogwheel, as per the link.
4. I had to install that vscode-unity-debug plugin in VSCode, just filtering the search with 'unity' found it.
5. I then had to press the green 'play' triangle.
6. I set a breakpoint in my code.
7. Now over to unity and press play, and the breakpoint gets hit.

Answer 4

Yes it works absolutely fine. Unity is C#, JavaScript or Boo. So, you don't need .NET for it. Unity uses Mono runtime. So, an existing VS project can be opened in Unity for Mac OS X.

EDIT

Here is a link that helps you to attach a debugger to the VS endpoint. http://www.yunspace.com/2015/01/19/integrating-visualstudio-with-unity3d-on-mac-using-vstools/

You can try VS Tools for Unity too. http://unityvs.com

UPDATE

There is this awesome Unity Plugin by dotBunny that solves the problem and integrates Code with Unity tools.

Answer 5

Hi the solution is https://github.com/dotBunny/VSCode This plugin works on both MacOS and Windows and gives you the following capabilities:

•An option to enable VS Code integration (Editor –> Assets –> Enable Integration), this updates your solution files and (more importantly) keeps them in sync. This also sets the preferred external tool editor in the Unity preferences. *Note, the old “Sync MonoDevelop” option is now gone in the Unity editor from V5.2

•It writes out the necessary (and sometimes hard to find) VS Code configuration files, including the ability to hide “non-code” files in the editor (hides things like .sln, .csproj and the ever present unity .meta files) There are a couple of other settings in there to help speed up the integration.

•Automatically launches VS Code direct to your project folder, EVERY-TIME. no longer do you have to worry about keeping that window open, or switching around if you work on multiple projects

One thing to be aware of, once you enable the VSCode integration, changing your preferred code editor in the External Tools preferences will have no effect as the plugin takes over opening code files. If you want to use another editor, you’ll have to disable the integration first.

These are just the main highlights as there are more features in there as well.

Currently you need to download the plugin files from GitHub

Answer 6

To build Unity in Visual Studio Code, you can hook up Mono xbuild compiler as a task runner, so you don't even have to leave IDE to have errors and warnings.

See https://twitter.com/_eppz/status/846859856787259392 for more.