Installing UWP support in Visual Studio
When you install Unity, you have the option to install Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Unity as the default script editor. It's a great editor and debugging environment. However, this edition installed with Unity is not a full version of Visual Studio. To target your build as a separate UWP app, you will need to use a full version of Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is a powerful integrated developer environment (IDE) for all kinds of projects. When we build for UWP from Unity we will actually build a Visual Studio-ready project folder that you can then open in VS to complete the compile, build and deploy process, to run the app on your device.
Visual Studio comes in three editions, Community, Professional, and Enterprise; any of these are sufficient for us. The Community version is free and can be downloaded from here: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/.
Once the installer is downloaded, open it to choose which components to install. Under the Workloads tab we have selected:
- Universal Windows Platform development
- Game development with Unity
Also, select the Game development with Unity options, as follows:
We can now go into Unity. First, we should make sure Unity knows we're using Visual Studio:
- Go to Edit | Preferences
- In the External Tools tab, make sure Visual Studio is selected as your External Script Editor, like so:
