For several years now, the Unity installer has included the ability to install MonoDevelop, the open source C# IDE by Xamarin. With the upcoming release of Unity 2018.1 this will no longer be the case, as it is being removed from the installer and support is being dropped. This isn’t really a huge development however, as since Microsoft purchased Xamarin last year they have released a version of MonoDevelopment/Xamarin Studio called Visual Studio for Mac, which will continue to be supported.
Details from the Unity blog:
With the (currently experimental) .NET 4.6 scripting runtime upgrade in Unity we are moving towards supporting many of the new exciting C# features available in C# 6.0 and beyond. It very important for us at Unity that we also provide a great C# IDE experience to accompany the new C# features.
MonoDevelop-Unity 5.9.6 that we ship with Unity today does not support the latest C# features and is also not compatible with debugging C# scripts in the new .NET 4.6 scripting runtime in Unity. To address this we are making 2 changes.
- Removing MonoDevelop-Unity 5.9.6 from the Unity 2018.1 installer on macOS and Windows and no longer supporting it for Unity development starting from Unity 2018.1.
- Including Visual Studio for Mac as the only C# IDE on macOS in Unity 2018.1.
On Windows we will continue to include Visual Studio 2017 Community and no longer include MonoDevelop-Unity as an alternative.Visual Studio for Mac already includes Unity integration out of the box and has since Unity 5.6.1, supporting both the latest C# features and debugging of C# scripts on the .NET 4.6 scripting runtime.
MonoDevelop-Unity users on macOS can download and install Visual Studio for Mac and start using it today.