6 ms·

A Lap Around Python in Visual Studio 2017

109 points by LyalinDotCom 9y ago

devopsproject 9y ago
Damn, they are killing it.
satysin 9y ago
Who would have thought 5 years ago that today some of the best tools for Python development would be developed by Microsoft as part of Visual Studio?
- Loic 9y ago
  This is great, this will help getting support of a Python "stack" for enterprise projects. At the moment I am mostly doing them in C#/VB.net and always need to discuss a lot to get Python acceptance when scientific workload is required (it is easier to say Fortran + C#/VB.net than Python!). Now, I will be able to add: "Microsoft is fully supporting Python" and this will basically close the deal. I am happy.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Using Visual Studio with Conda would be a really good compelling way to get it into Enterprise projects. Conda's packaging requires much less effort.
    - chupapuma 9y ago
      /Dev on Python Team chiming in/ You can use conda + PTVS. About half of my python installs are Anaconda and it works well for me. When you right click on your environment in solution explorer, you can select to install packages and change between pip, conda, and easy_install.
  - smortaz 9y ago
    /team lead here/ Thanks! Regarding "Scientific" - we just added the Data Science Workload to Visual Studio 2017. Check it out here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/05/10/build-intelligent-apps-faster-with-visual-studio/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/05/10/bui... Basically Python + Anaconda, R + Microsoft enhanced R, F# with .Net as a single install. Python & R work with any interpreter, including IronPython & Pypy.
    - Loic 9y ago
      Thanks a lot! This is exactly what I need, this will ease my arguments when I need to port/bring some "Matlab" code/models into a GUI tremendously. Now, /me is dreaming of a cross-platform WPF with Python as language and integrated in the IDE like C#/VB.net. I am using PyQT but this is not the best on Windows. On a side note, just comparing Visual Studio today and Visual Studio of my first real work days in VC++/MFC (something like 20 years ago), I must say that it really makes me ship good software faster and better. Thank you!
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Windows has had Python support from the official version of Python since 2000. Microsoft supported and helped create IronPython from 2008.
  - smortaz 9y ago
    /team lead/ This is true, although IronPython is managed by the community and is doing well. Visual Studio supports IronPython, CPython, Pypy, ...
cwisecarver 9y ago
What ever happened to IronPython running on the CLR?
- zerkten 9y ago
  It was divested for a number of reasons. First, there was (and still is) the Python 2 to 3 transition. Supporting Python 3 added a lot of overhead while full Python 2 support was not available yet. It also turns out that a lot of popular Python libraries have dependencies on C/C++ code, so there were attempts like IronClad to provide support for these, but it wasn't as easy as CPython. There were benefits like the CLR being able to handle some workloads better than CPython with its GIL, but there are expectations in some libraries that it's CPython running the code. Startup performance also takes a hit due to jitting, so IronPython had to implement some tricks to make it run scripts fast on the first run. This is a pretty common case. Then you add in compatibility and testing with frameworks like Django, and balancing that against further development of the core. Even if you support these frameworks, you may not be able to support some of the libraries and tools that these developers coming from the open source world use, so their experience can be soured and the project appears to be more of a science project. That said, IronPython can excel in niches, such as adding scriptability to your .NET app. But that's not going to take over the world. These problems also applied to IronRuby. Both of them seemed to be joined at the hip in terms of management, so I think that internal dealings at Microsoft were part of the downfall. I have no idea what happened, but in the bigger picture at that time, Microsoft was finally learning to do things a better way with ASP.NET MVC. For their constituents that may have been a better investment.
  - RussianCow 9y ago
    Plus, now you have Python for .NET[0] and similar projects that allow you to seamlessly integrate CPython into your .NET program. This gives you the best of both worlds and negates a lot of the value of a dedicated .NET Python implementation. [0]: https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet
    - denfromufa 9y ago
bauerd 9y ago
And on the other side of the fence there's XCode, unable to refactor Swift …
- WaxProlix 9y ago
  Just talking to some swift/iOS devs that I've done some projects with the other day, and their workflow basically uses the JetBrains IDE and Xcode simultaneously - one for code and the other because the JetBrains offering apparently doesn't support storyboards (yet?). Coming from a backend perspective, it sounds pretty atrocious.
teemwerk 9y ago
Wow, that looks like a lot of really cool stuff. Might have to get back in a python kind of mood, this really looks impressive, especially the c++ extensions.
burntwater 9y ago
The reasons to stick with macs are getting fewer and fewer by the day...
- dep_b 9y ago
  Why did you ever need a Mac for Python and what's so different now? macOS comes with Python built-in but in terms of IDE's there's PyCharm for macOS and PyCharm for Windows and they're both just as effective. You just install them. Code.
  - burntwater 9y ago
    Python specifically, no particular reason. As a cohesive environment, Microsoft is chipping away at every reason I've had to stick with Macs and their limited selection of hardware. Learning that a new Mac Pro is at least a year away has me looking MUCH closer at Windows. And bit by bit, Microsoft is crossing out all the reasons I had in my mental "No Microsoft" column.
    - dep_b 9y ago
      Since I'm a Cocoa developer and I don't like change for the sake of change I'm just using Parallels for Visual Studio and Windows software development and macOS for my main OS. I don't particularly dislike Windows but it's still a bit messy. However under the hood Windows is catching up if not overtaking macOS since Windows Vista. I'm probably one of the few people that thought it was an amazing improvement over Windows XP at the time (using it on a machine with rock solid driver support perhaps helped). The graphics subsystem, security, driver model: everything was better. I just want Windows to be incrementally improved and homogenized for a long while instead of half assed system wide changes every other release. The real beauty of macOS in my opinion is that somebody coming from the betas on a BW G3 in 1999 would still find his or her way easily on a 2017 Mac. But when they changed it from OS 9 to OS X they did it drastically and with a pretty clean cut from the past.
- nirav72 9y ago
  Yep. Especially after they added WSL to win 10. I've primarily used a 3 year old macbook for development at home. But my employer hands out win10 laptops for day to day work. Now with WSL, I don't really miss the mac much. Most likely will hold off on buying a new macbook and just go with something like XPS 13 with win10 in the next year or two.
jjmanton 9y ago
I was really hoping Visual Studio 2017 for Mac would support this, but it looks like it doesnt have full extension support yet.
- johnhattan 9y ago
  Visual Studio for the Mac is a re-branding of Xamarin Studio, so it doesn't actually share any code with Visual Studio for Windows. I doubt that VS Windows plugins will ever work with it.
- smortaz 9y ago
  /team lead/ Unfortunately VS for Mac currently doesn't support Python or R (the two languages our team supports). However, if you are interested, please file the request on uservocie - that really helps us convince mgmt. Meanwhile, VS Code has pretty decent Python support which can be used on Windows, MacOS and Linux: VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python uservoice: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...
nrjames 9y ago
I do a lot of Python work and like most of the other "heavy" IDEs, this doesn't appeal to me at all. The more layers of stuff you wrap around what you're trying to do, the harder it is, in my experience, to make it easy to deploy and maintain. I guess I'm turning into a graybeard.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  I can see how the value of an IDE is much smaller in a dynamic language than a statically typed one. In the statically typed language compiler output, test output source symbols etc are links to other things in the project. That's hard to accomplish in an editor + shell setup (or requires a huge config effort that effectively makes the editor an IDE). I would use vscode or similar if I did JS or Python, but for C# or Java you'd have to pry the IDE from my cold dead hands :)
  - int_19h 9y ago
    Even with a dynamically typed language, the IDE can do type inference to provide a lot of useful stuff, like go to definition of a symbol, or refactoring.
    - lou1306 9y ago
      And when the IDE exploits Python 3 type annotation, the "static vs. dynamic" gap is much less painful.
- RussianCow 9y ago
  > The more layers of stuff you wrap around what you're trying to do, the harder it is, in my experience, to make it easy to deploy and maintain. I'm not sure how your choice of editor has any impact on your ability to deploy and maintain your code.
- smortaz 9y ago
  /team lead/ Totally understand - Visual Studio can be somewhat heavy weight especially for basic editing. In that case, check VS Code's Python support. It's very lightweight and cross-platform: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python
dom0 9y ago
(Entirely unrelated to the actual contents) I find it remarkable how visually inconsistent all of the shown screenshots are. (Look at all the small details that differ between each screenshot, like margins around buttons, button sizing, size of text entry fields, chevron styles and so on and so forth) Windows (in this millennium, anyway) was never a really visually consistent OS, because it pretty much always had some leftover crud GUIs, and even today some dialogues from the early 90s exist nearly unchanged, though.
- electricEmu 9y ago
  I use Visual Studio for work. I'm not seeing all the inconsistencies. The only component I loathe is the git integration.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dafrankenstein2 9y ago
my first experience was with python tools for visual studio 2012. i still use vs2012. its a charm.
namingwaysway 9y ago
I really liked the VS IDE when I was a windows programmer, I'm still struggling to find something comparable. My fears are still that python code on windows is still a nightmare, especially when you throw something like OpenCV into the mix.
- smortaz 9y ago
  /team lead/ Your fears regarding Python on Windows were quite justified. However, the world has dramatically changed, thanks in large part to folks like Continuum.io and their Anaconda distribution, Christoph Golke, and many other wheel providers. Visual Studio actually provides an option to download Anaconda for you. It has a few hundred pre-built Windows pkgs ready to go. We also use it on our free jupyter notebook service and have been very happy with it. UCI repo: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ Anaconda: https://www.continuum.io/downloads https://www.continuum.io/downloads Azure Notebooks: https://notebooks.azure.com https://notebooks.azure.com
  - chupapuma 9y ago
    /Dev on Team/ Also many packages, NumPy for instance, have improved their builds for Windows. This is a combination effort of better support on the platform side to make things better but also from package maintainers to support Windows users better. If you have been away from Windows for a bit, I think now is a good time to at least take a cursory look around again ;)
mkane848 9y ago
Has anyone used this for Django development? I currently use SublimeText 3 for just about everything but I'm always open to new ideas.
- chupapuma 9y ago
  /Dev on Team/ I have used it with Django, but most of my Django apps are mere toys compared to things that other people are working on. This probably isn't that useful of a video, but this was a talk at PyData using PTVS + Django to demo some Azure Services https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PElcaj1iylA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PElcaj1iylA
imcoconut 9y ago
This looks awesome. Does anyone have any opinions on how this compares to pycharm for similar IDE functionality and jupyter support?

109 points by LyalinDotCom 9y ago

Damn, they are killing it.

Who would have thought 5 years ago that today some of the best tools for Python development would be developed by Microsoft as part of Visual Studio?

Loic 9y ago
This is great, this will help getting support of a Python "stack" for enterprise projects. At the moment I am mostly doing them in C#/VB.net and always need to discuss a lot to get Python acceptance when scientific workload is required (it is easier to say Fortran + C#/VB.net than Python!). Now, I will be able to add: "Microsoft is fully supporting Python" and this will basically close the deal. I am happy.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Using Visual Studio with Conda would be a really good compelling way to get it into Enterprise projects. Conda's packaging requires much less effort.
  - chupapuma 9y ago
    /Dev on Python Team chiming in/ You can use conda + PTVS. About half of my python installs are Anaconda and it works well for me. When you right click on your environment in solution explorer, you can select to install packages and change between pip, conda, and easy_install.
- smortaz 9y ago
  /team lead here/ Thanks! Regarding "Scientific" - we just added the Data Science Workload to Visual Studio 2017. Check it out here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/05/10/build-intelligent-apps-faster-with-visual-studio/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/05/10/bui... Basically Python + Anaconda, R + Microsoft enhanced R, F# with .Net as a single install. Python & R work with any interpreter, including IronPython & Pypy.
  - Loic 9y ago
    Thanks a lot! This is exactly what I need, this will ease my arguments when I need to port/bring some "Matlab" code/models into a GUI tremendously. Now, /me is dreaming of a cross-platform WPF with Python as language and integrated in the IDE like C#/VB.net. I am using PyQT but this is not the best on Windows. On a side note, just comparing Visual Studio today and Visual Studio of my first real work days in VC++/MFC (something like 20 years ago), I must say that it really makes me ship good software faster and better. Thank you!
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Windows has had Python support from the official version of Python since 2000. Microsoft supported and helped create IronPython from 2008.
- smortaz 9y ago
  /team lead/ This is true, although IronPython is managed by the community and is doing well. Visual Studio supports IronPython, CPython, Pypy, ...

cwisecarver 9y ago

What ever happened to IronPython running on the CLR?

zerkten 9y ago
It was divested for a number of reasons. First, there was (and still is) the Python 2 to 3 transition. Supporting Python 3 added a lot of overhead while full Python 2 support was not available yet. It also turns out that a lot of popular Python libraries have dependencies on C/C++ code, so there were attempts like IronClad to provide support for these, but it wasn't as easy as CPython. There were benefits like the CLR being able to handle some workloads better than CPython with its GIL, but there are expectations in some libraries that it's CPython running the code. Startup performance also takes a hit due to jitting, so IronPython had to implement some tricks to make it run scripts fast on the first run. This is a pretty common case. Then you add in compatibility and testing with frameworks like Django, and balancing that against further development of the core. Even if you support these frameworks, you may not be able to support some of the libraries and tools that these developers coming from the open source world use, so their experience can be soured and the project appears to be more of a science project. That said, IronPython can excel in niches, such as adding scriptability to your .NET app. But that's not going to take over the world. These problems also applied to IronRuby. Both of them seemed to be joined at the hip in terms of management, so I think that internal dealings at Microsoft were part of the downfall. I have no idea what happened, but in the bigger picture at that time, Microsoft was finally learning to do things a better way with ASP.NET MVC. For their constituents that may have been a better investment.
- RussianCow 9y ago
  Plus, now you have Python for .NET[0] and similar projects that allow you to seamlessly integrate CPython into your .NET program. This gives you the best of both worlds and negates a lot of the value of a dedicated .NET Python implementation. [0]: https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet
  - denfromufa 9y ago

bauerd 9y ago

And on the other side of the fence there's XCode, unable to refactor Swift …

WaxProlix 9y ago
Just talking to some swift/iOS devs that I've done some projects with the other day, and their workflow basically uses the JetBrains IDE and Xcode simultaneously - one for code and the other because the JetBrains offering apparently doesn't support storyboards (yet?). Coming from a backend perspective, it sounds pretty atrocious.

teemwerk 9y ago

Wow, that looks like a lot of really cool stuff. Might have to get back in a python kind of mood, this really looks impressive, especially the c++ extensions.

burntwater 9y ago

The reasons to stick with macs are getting fewer and fewer by the day...

dep_b 9y ago
Why did you ever need a Mac for Python and what's so different now? macOS comes with Python built-in but in terms of IDE's there's PyCharm for macOS and PyCharm for Windows and they're both just as effective. You just install them. Code.
- burntwater 9y ago
  Python specifically, no particular reason. As a cohesive environment, Microsoft is chipping away at every reason I've had to stick with Macs and their limited selection of hardware. Learning that a new Mac Pro is at least a year away has me looking MUCH closer at Windows. And bit by bit, Microsoft is crossing out all the reasons I had in my mental "No Microsoft" column.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Since I'm a Cocoa developer and I don't like change for the sake of change I'm just using Parallels for Visual Studio and Windows software development and macOS for my main OS. I don't particularly dislike Windows but it's still a bit messy. However under the hood Windows is catching up if not overtaking macOS since Windows Vista. I'm probably one of the few people that thought it was an amazing improvement over Windows XP at the time (using it on a machine with rock solid driver support perhaps helped). The graphics subsystem, security, driver model: everything was better. I just want Windows to be incrementally improved and homogenized for a long while instead of half assed system wide changes every other release. The real beauty of macOS in my opinion is that somebody coming from the betas on a BW G3 in 1999 would still find his or her way easily on a 2017 Mac. But when they changed it from OS 9 to OS X they did it drastically and with a pretty clean cut from the past.
nirav72 9y ago
Yep. Especially after they added WSL to win 10. I've primarily used a 3 year old macbook for development at home. But my employer hands out win10 laptops for day to day work. Now with WSL, I don't really miss the mac much. Most likely will hold off on buying a new macbook and just go with something like XPS 13 with win10 in the next year or two.

jjmanton 9y ago

I was really hoping Visual Studio 2017 for Mac would support this, but it looks like it doesnt have full extension support yet.

johnhattan 9y ago
Visual Studio for the Mac is a re-branding of Xamarin Studio, so it doesn't actually share any code with Visual Studio for Windows. I doubt that VS Windows plugins will ever work with it.
smortaz 9y ago
/team lead/ Unfortunately VS for Mac currently doesn't support Python or R (the two languages our team supports). However, if you are interested, please file the request on uservocie - that really helps us convince mgmt. Meanwhile, VS Code has pretty decent Python support which can be used on Windows, MacOS and Linux: VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python uservoice: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

nrjames 9y ago

I do a lot of Python work and like most of the other "heavy" IDEs, this doesn't appeal to me at all. The more layers of stuff you wrap around what you're trying to do, the harder it is, in my experience, to make it easy to deploy and maintain. I guess I'm turning into a graybeard.

alkonaut 9y ago
I can see how the value of an IDE is much smaller in a dynamic language than a statically typed one. In the statically typed language compiler output, test output source symbols etc are links to other things in the project. That's hard to accomplish in an editor + shell setup (or requires a huge config effort that effectively makes the editor an IDE). I would use vscode or similar if I did JS or Python, but for C# or Java you'd have to pry the IDE from my cold dead hands :)
- int_19h 9y ago
  Even with a dynamically typed language, the IDE can do type inference to provide a lot of useful stuff, like go to definition of a symbol, or refactoring.
  - lou1306 9y ago
    And when the IDE exploits Python 3 type annotation, the "static vs. dynamic" gap is much less painful.
RussianCow 9y ago
> The more layers of stuff you wrap around what you're trying to do, the harder it is, in my experience, to make it easy to deploy and maintain. I'm not sure how your choice of editor has any impact on your ability to deploy and maintain your code.
smortaz 9y ago
/team lead/ Totally understand - Visual Studio can be somewhat heavy weight especially for basic editing. In that case, check VS Code's Python support. It's very lightweight and cross-platform: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python

dom0 9y ago

(Entirely unrelated to the actual contents) I find it remarkable how visually inconsistent all of the shown screenshots are. (Look at all the small details that differ between each screenshot, like margins around buttons, button sizing, size of text entry fields, chevron styles and so on and so forth) Windows (in this millennium, anyway) was never a really visually consistent OS, because it pretty much always had some leftover crud GUIs, and even today some dialogues from the early 90s exist nearly unchanged, though.

electricEmu 9y ago
I use Visual Studio for work. I'm not seeing all the inconsistencies. The only component I loathe is the git integration.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dafrankenstein2 9y ago

my first experience was with python tools for visual studio 2012. i still use vs2012. its a charm.

namingwaysway 9y ago

I really liked the VS IDE when I was a windows programmer, I'm still struggling to find something comparable. My fears are still that python code on windows is still a nightmare, especially when you throw something like OpenCV into the mix.

smortaz 9y ago
/team lead/ Your fears regarding Python on Windows were quite justified. However, the world has dramatically changed, thanks in large part to folks like Continuum.io and their Anaconda distribution, Christoph Golke, and many other wheel providers. Visual Studio actually provides an option to download Anaconda for you. It has a few hundred pre-built Windows pkgs ready to go. We also use it on our free jupyter notebook service and have been very happy with it. UCI repo: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ Anaconda: https://www.continuum.io/downloads https://www.continuum.io/downloads Azure Notebooks: https://notebooks.azure.com https://notebooks.azure.com
- chupapuma 9y ago
  /Dev on Team/ Also many packages, NumPy for instance, have improved their builds for Windows. This is a combination effort of better support on the platform side to make things better but also from package maintainers to support Windows users better. If you have been away from Windows for a bit, I think now is a good time to at least take a cursory look around again ;)

mkane848 9y ago

Has anyone used this for Django development? I currently use SublimeText 3 for just about everything but I'm always open to new ideas.

chupapuma 9y ago
/Dev on Team/ I have used it with Django, but most of my Django apps are mere toys compared to things that other people are working on. This probably isn't that useful of a video, but this was a talk at PyData using PTVS + Django to demo some Azure Services https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PElcaj1iylA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PElcaj1iylA

imcoconut 9y ago

This looks awesome. Does anyone have any opinions on how this compares to pycharm for similar IDE functionality and jupyter support?