Microsoft acquires SyntaxTree, creator of UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio

Game developers build the apps that hundreds of millions of users play every day across a wide variety of devices, from Xbox and Windows to iOS, Android and the Web. Games are the most popular application type on every major mobile platform, and Windows has long been a great home for desktop gaming. For developers, Visual Studio has been one of the most heavily used tools for game development across the industry, used by big game studios and indie developers alike.

Over the last 10 years, the Unity cross-platform game engine has grown to become a widely used rendering engine and tool for game developers targeting desktop, consoles, mobile devices and the web, with over 2 million developers now using Unity for game development. Unity offers great support for targeting or porting to Windows, across Windows desktop, Windows Store and Windows Phone.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that we are acquiring SyntaxTree, the developers of the UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio.

UnityVS enables Unity developers to take advantage of the productivity of Visual Studio to author, browse and debug the code for their Unity applications. Already today, dozens of the biggest names in game development rely on Visual Studio and the UnityVS plugin.

With this acquisition, we have the opportunity to integrate this support for Unity even more deeply into Visual Studio, and to continue to push forward Visual Studio's support for game developers.  Microsoft will also make the existing UnityVS plugin available for free on our download site shortly.

[EDIT 7/29/2014:  Visual Studio Tools for Unity 1.9 is now available for download]

In today's mobile-first, cloud-first world, Visual Studio provides a great development environment for game developers targeting the breadth of mobile devices, and connecting to the rich services platforms in Azure.

I am excited about our opportunity to continue to push game development with Visual Studio forward with the help of the SyntaxTree team.

Namaste!