Analyzers for Unity

This project provides Visual Studio with a better understanding of Unity projects by adding Unity-specific diagnostics or by removing general C# diagnostics that do not apply to Unity projects.

Check out the list of analyzers and suppressors defined in this project.

Releases

We are focusing our efforts on the experience brought by our IDEs (Visual Studio, and Visual Studio for Mac) with Unity where these analyzers ship in the box. For Visual Studio Code, please use our official Unity extension here.

We also ship them on NuGet as for people building class librairies for Unity and for other advanced usages.

Suggesting a new Analyzer

If you have an idea for a best practice for Unity developers to follow, please open an issue with the description.

Prerequisites

For building and testing, you'll need .NET 9 and Visual Studio 2022 17.12+, or Visual Studio Code 1.92+.

This project binaries are targeting Visual Studio 2019 16.4+, Visual Studio for Mac 8.4+ and Visual Studio Code 1.76+.

This project is using the DiagnosticSuppressor API to conditionally suppress reported compiler/analyzer diagnostics.

On Windows, you'll need the Visual Studio extension development workload installed to build a VSIX to use and debug the project in Visual Studio.

For unit-testing, we require Unity to be installed. We recommend using the latest LTS version for that.

Building and testing

Compiling the solution: dotnet build .\src\Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.sln

Running the unit tests: dotnet test .\src\Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.sln

You can open .\src\Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.sln in your favorite IDE to work on the analyzers and run/debug the tests.

Debugging the analyzers on a Unity project

Running and debugging the tests is the easiest way to get started but sometimes you want to work on a real-life Unity project.

On Visual Studio

• Open the Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.Vsix.sln solution.
• Make sure Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.Vsix is set as the startup project.
• Hit play (Current Instance) to start debugging an experimental instance of Visual Studio 2022.
• Load any Unity project in the Visual Studio experimental instance then put breakpoints in the Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers project.

On Visual Studio for Mac

• Open the Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.Mpack.sln solution.
• Make sure Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers.Mpack is set as the startup project.
• Hit play to start debugging an experimental instance of Visual Studio for Mac.
• Load any Unity project in the Visual Studio for Mac experimental instance then put breakpoints in the Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers project.

Handling duplicate diagnostics

Starting with Visual Studio Tools for Unity 4.3.2.0 (or 2.3.2.0 on MacOS), we ship and automatically include this set of analyzers/suppressors in all projects generated by Unity (using <Analyzer Include="..." /> directive).

The downside of this is when trying to debug your own solution is to find yourself with duplicated diagnostics because Visual Studio will load both:

• the project-local analyzer that we release and include automatically, through the <Analyzer Include="..." /> directive.
• the VSIX extension you deployed, that will apply analyzers/suppressors to all projects in the IDE.

To disable the project-local analyzer, and keeping a workflow compatible with Unity re-generating project files on all asset changes, you can add the following script in an Editor folder of your Unity project to disable all local analyzers loaded with <Analyzer Include="..." /> directive.

using UnityEditor;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public class DisableLocalAnalyzersPostProcessor : AssetPostprocessor
{
	public static string OnGeneratedCSProject(string path, string content)
	{
		return Regex.Replace(content, "(\\<Analyzer)\\s+(Include=\".*Microsoft\\.Unity\\.Analyzers\\.dll\")", "$1 Condition=\"false\" $2");
	}
}

Creating a new analyzer

To easily create a new analyzer, you can use the following command:

dotnet run --project .\src\new-analyzer

This will automatically create source files for the analyzer, associated tests and add resource entries. If your new analyzer's name contains the word suppressor, the tool will create a new suppressor. By default the tool will create a regular analyzer and codefix.

Example for creating CustomAnalyzer, CustomCodeFix and CustomTests classes :

dotnet run --project .\src\new-analyzer Custom

Example for creating CustomSuppressor and CustomSuppressorTests classes :

dotnet run --project .\src\new-analyzer CustomSuppressor

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Please have a look at our Guidelines for contributing.