Shadows in Unity is something that in most cases is a given through the use of surface shaders, but sometimes you don't want to use a surface shader for whatever reason and create your own vertex/fragment shader. The biggest advantage is that everything is in your hands now, but this is also one of the drawbacks because you now have to handle a lot of stuff that Unity conveniently handled for you in a surface shader. Among such things are support for multiple lights and shadows.
