Today at Build, Microsoft announced that Unity is joining the .NET Foundation. Quoting from the announcement:

“This marks an important milestone in opening the technical decision making processes of the core .NET projects and also demonstrates the commitment of these partners in helping to make sure .NET continues to be an open, innovate and exciting development platform.”

We are indeed looking forward to working together with Microsoft and the other foundation members to help shape the future direction of .NET and to make Unity’s .NET experience great. For Unity developers, this means making sure the latest .NET APIs, tools, and language features are available to you. It means representing your interests to maintain and further improve .NET as a great platform for developing games.

To this end we have been and will continue to work on:

– IL2CPP .NET Runtime

– Native Visual Studio Integration

– Support for C# 6

– Upgrade Mono Runtime and Class Libraries

– High Performance Garbage Collector

The IL2CPP .NET Runtime powers scripting for Unity on many platforms. It combines the efficiency and ease of use of .NET with the portability and performance of native C++. We are continually improving the performance of IL2CPP as we deploy it to more platforms.

Native Visual Studio integration has been available since Unity 5.2. It provides a rich, out of the box debugging experience for Unity within Visual Studio.

The other items mentioned will be rolled out one by one as they are ready. They are a top priority within Unity and work is already underway. When we get closer to releasing these features, we will update our public roadmap with them.

Once again, we are excited to become a member of the .NET Foundation and to see continued openness, innovation, and collaboration in the .NET ecosystem.