Setting Visual Studio 2013 as the Default Editor for Unity

With our registration to BizSpark now complete it was time to take advantage of getting Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate for free and use it for the editor instead of MonoDevelop. I find that the autocomplete function in MonoDevelop doesn't always work as well as expected, so using VS may be better.

This integration opens scripts in Visual Studio, if you want better integration than that, then you want to look at UnityVS. If you're an Indie with 4 or less employees, then UnityVS is just $99. You can find out about their pricing here.

Open up Unity and click "Edit > Preferences" and then click on "External Tools".

Click on the drop-down list next to "External Script Editor" (it shows "MonoDevelop (built-in)" by default) and select "Browse". Visual Studio is an x86 application, so it will be in your "Program Files (x86)" if you are using a 64bit OS, or just "Program Files" if you're using a 32-bit OS.  I installed Visual Studio on my D Drive (on a machine running Windows 8.1 64-bit), so the path to it is:

D:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE

Select the "Application" "devenv.exe" and click "Open".The drop-down list will now show as "Microsoft Visual Studio 2013" so close the Preferences window and the next time you open a script in Unity, then it will open in Visual Studio 2013.