If you use Visual Studio Community as your code editor, it’s recommended to have it propperly linked to your Unity project in order to enable advanced IDE features like: IntelliSense, error detection, navigation, refactoring and debugging.
0.- How to know if Visual Studio is propperly linked? #
Open any unity script double clicking it form Unity.
If any of these problems appear, Visual Studio is not propperly linked:
- When double clicking, Visual Studio does not open automatically
- When opening a second script, another completely different window of Visual Studio opens instead of a new tab on the current window
- After 30s or so, the “MonoBehaviour” word on the script is white
- After 30s or so, on top of the script class name “Unity Script 1 XXX references” does not appear
- After 30s or so, the Start o Update functions do not turn blue
If Visual Studio is not propperly linked, you can check multiple things to make sure it’s linked:
1.- Visual Studio Community is not propperly installed #
Make sure that you have Visual Studio Community correctly installed, you can check on how to do it right in this tutorial: Unity – Installation – IDE
1.1.- The Unity workload for Visual Studio is not installed #
If you have Visual Studio Community correctly installed, make sure that you have installed correctly the Unity workload and all the required individual components. You can check out a tutorial on how to do so in: Unity – Installation – Configuring Visual Studio
2.- Visual Studio Community package is not installed or up to date on the Unity project #
From Unity open the menu “Window > Package Manager”
- On the left menu, click “Unity Registry”
- On the search box enter “Visual Studio”
- Once the package list refreshes (This can last for more than a minute on the first time) select “Visual Studio Editor”
- Click on the “Install” or “Update” button on the right menu and wait for the installation to finish
3.- The external tools are not propperly configured in Unity #
From Unity open the menu “Edit > Preferences…”
- On the left menu, click “External Tools”
- On the External Script Editor dropdown select “Visual Studio 2022” or the newest version available
- If you don’t see any Visual Studio Community options in here, check the previous steps and restart your computer
- Click on “Regenerate project files”
- Restart Unity and Visual Studio