Unity can't find my Visual Studio installation

I just setup a brand new developer machine and installed Unity 2018.3.0f2 and Visual Studio 15.9.4. The Unity installer gave me an error that it failed to install the Visual Studio tools for Unity, with no additional details. Within the Unity Editor, I cannot select Visual Studio as the “External Script Editor” under preferences, and also when I go to Build Settings I see an error that says “Could not find any supported Visual Studio installations.” Any tips on how to resolve this?

Thanks!
Ryan

Did you install Visual Studio after Unity? If so, Try reinstall Unity.

1 Like

I’m pretty sure I installed VS before Unity, but I just tried re-installing Unity and that seems to have resolved the problem.

I have the same problem,and I can’t solve it after re-installing Unity

Did you find a solution to this? I’ve come across this problem this morning.

VS had installed with Unity previously, however this morning I updated Unity, so that now Unity was installed after VS*.*

I’ve been having this problem since last week with 2018.3.7f1 (and now with 2018.3.8f1). With 2018.3.6f1 and previous versions I was able to install or uninstall or use previously installed VS versions without issues. I tried uninstalling ALL versions of Unity and VS, which didn’t help, so I went through and deleted any remaining folders related to VS or Unity that I could find. Regardless, every attempt to install VS returns this cryptic error - even though VS is installed and can be started, but now it only opens individual CS files instead of the entire project as expected. Also the debugger doesn’t work, I have to manually Attach Unity Debugger every time instead of just pressing F5 (Start/Attach).

This all started when I had 2018.3.2/3/4/5/6/7/8 installed and wanted to cleanup old versions… so I uninstalled everything except 2018.3.6/7/8, where .6 was when I had last installed Visual Studio during Unity installation.

I just now finished a complete reinstall of Windows 10 (including HDD format) followed by Unity Hub and 2018.3.8f1 and I’m still getting this error! I have a feeling 2018.3.7/8 both have a VS installation problem - it would be wonderful if there was a log file with information about what error instead of the generic message.

This might be a long shot but did you restart the machine after installing VS?

1 Like

Ha, good guess! The standard question to IT problems: did you reboot? :smile: I forgot to write back… but yes, after rebooting everything works normally… though I’m not sure if reinstalling Windows also played some role, I’m fairly certain I rebooted several times before going the reinstall route (for other reasons) and I reboot daily, while the problem was ongoing for several days.

Thanks for the suggestion in any case, hopefully it helps somebody else.

this is dumb asf. why would they make it so you have to uninstall visual studio install unity first and then re install visual wtf? why make things this hard

You shouldn’t have to uninstall anything.

How can we solve the problem without uninstall anything?

Which problem? Rebooting helped the person above.