Python Tools for Visual Studio

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2011/08/29/python-tools-for-visual-studio.aspx

by johndcook • 15 years ago

185 98 15 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for?

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

I used to hack in Python on Windows, solely because that was the machine I had at hand.

pointyhat3• 15 years ago

I do, although it's slowly being replaced with PowerShell (which is more convenient for integrating with windows applications, has better pipe semantics and better management stuff, particularly WMI, deployment etc). Plus it's built in and comes with a nice IDE on Win7 (PowerShell ISE).

At the moment though, I use Python for time management (using some scripts I wrote), a general purpose calculator, data munging on the fly, watching memcache stats, reporting and some other general bits of duct tape and string.

zcrar70• 15 years ago

I really struggle with PowerShell - so many things don't work like I expect them to (e.g. passing arguments to the command line, which is surprisingly hard given that's one of the problems it was meant to solve; anything involving operators - these are different from any other language; different error condition semantics for the different built-in commands; default error handling behaviour; etc.)

Having the power of .Net in a scripting language is great, but it would have been even nicer if that language was consistent with the others on the platform (C#, JS, Ruby, Python for instance.) In fact I regularly think of converting our existing PS deployment scripts to Python, and better tooling support would definitely help.

mkr-hn• 15 years ago

Go at it from the other direction: How many people here would use Python on Windows if there were better/more Python tools for Windows?

dagw8• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity what additional tools to you want. I use Python on Windows and haven't found anything of note missing.

dagw8• 15 years ago

I am. Developing 3D visualization applications. Mainly a desktop application using wxPython, but also a collection of web app front ends to those visualizations using cherrypy.

rufugee2• 15 years ago

Is it for commercial use? How do you plan to protect IP?

mynegation• 15 years ago

Financial engineering. Visualizations. Data conversion scripts. Various throwaway scripts. Different small scripts for personal tasks.

jroll3• 15 years ago

I do. We use python in our lab for simple scripts (backups and doing things our test SW isn't capable of, like HTTP comm), aggregating data, and some small web tools.

I'm at one of the big three, where getting a *nix machine on the network is next to impossible without piles of paperwork, and Windows is a requirement for our test machines. I'm all for better Windows tools :)

rch• 15 years ago

We are looking at it to build lightweight services on top of an unseemly pile of oracle, as part of a medical records system.

It is already used heavily on the analysis side, but windows isn't required there.

deleo• 15 years ago

I use Python on Windows for Django developement. Since I'm need to use other Win based software for work I use it also as my dev station. Can't complain, Windows does the job and Python doesn't care. One of the advantages of Python being x-platform. I find that most people that use Linux for dev, then emulate Windows for something, so I just stick to Win. This might change in Oct when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out, but probably now. Win has served me always very well.

briancurtin• 15 years ago

We develop trading software exclusively on Windows, and I use it for internal tools and our testing infrastructure. There are a few C extensions written to wrap our libraries, a lot of integration, regression, performance, and load libraries, and a bunch of dev tools to setup environments with our dependencies and such.

I introduced Python to the company in 2006 after writing a few very quick and dead simple test tools, and it seemed to pick up steam once our QA organization was looking for a way to beef up automation efforts.

WalterGR• 15 years ago

How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for?

I used it for Python's excellent NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit - http://www.nltk.org/) to build http://www.offensivest.com/books/ .

That site ranks the most vulgar English works released by Project Gutenberg. I calculated the ranking based on ~150k user ratings of the offensiveness of words listed on The Online Slang Dictionary.

skrebbel3• 15 years ago

You're asking that like it's special. Why is that? I mean, Python works great on Windows. Has an installer and all that; next next next finish. Package management is something of a hell (esp if you're used to ruby gems) but all in all it works fine.

I for one, prefer win as a dev platform, no matter the deployment platform. That means if the language of choice is Python, I use Python on Windows. I always assumed that this is rather common..

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

Most of the pythonistas I know are more or less evenly divided between Mac and various flavors of Unix. Windows users are somewhat rare, but present. I was curious if other groups have different profiles.

jroll3• 15 years ago

"Package management is somewhat of a hell..."

What about it? There's a few packages (mostly C extensions) that don't always build right, but the only problems I've had using pip and virtualenv on Windows have been related to corporate proxies/DNS.

pragmatic3• 15 years ago

> Package management is something of a hell (esp if you're used to ruby gems) but all in all it works fine.

Wow. Ruby must have come a long way. Of course I gave up on it a long time ago when I couldn't find a good decompression library (only one that I could get to work was documented in Japanese).

I've found most python stuff "just works" or can be made to work.

Of course my use of Ruby dates to 2006 or so, as you can see that dates me quite a bit. I'm sure things have improved greatly over the years.

cafard• 15 years ago

A variety of tasks. To mention just a few: moving data between spreadheets and a database, with edits along the way; bashing a vendor's files into a usable form; rewriting AutoCad interchange files (.dxf files) to include new labels based on existing ones; providing mass upload into a document library where the original developers gave us only file-at-a-time.

In the *x world, I tend to use Perl, because I learned that first and know things in my fingers that I have to stop and think about with Python. In the Windows world, though Python for Windows just makes life so much easier.

evilduck• 15 years ago

tkinter. Python/tkinter is the fastest and easiest way I've found to create and distribute small[1] cross platform apps with GUIs. Python's batteries included philosophy makes it really great for cross platform uses, although it sometimes means constraining yourself to only the included batteries.

Average users can easily manage installing Python since it requires no admin privileges, and it works out of the box without hassle (and it's already there for linux workstations). Once they have it installed you can just email *.pyw scripts and they work for Windows users automagically and email filters that block .exe attachments let them through. In the super restricted government computing environment I did this in (a mix of Windows and Linux computers), the only other reasonable option would have been the JVM, which wouldn't have been nearly as fast to develop against.

[1] I'm talking super simple one-off tools that are written and distributed in an afternoon, not fully designed and developed products. Keep in mind, creating a button that simply runs a regex against a file and spits out a result is literally magic for most people, what I can do in 3 hours of effort can save a non-programmer hundreds of man-hours of work.

megamark16• 15 years ago

One of my coworkers had a whole setup script for getting an entire python development environment setup on Windows using Cygwin, including pip, virtualenv, mysql, gcc, ang cyg-get (like apt-get for Cygwin). All of the rest of us in the office use Macs or Linux (me), but he was able to checkout our projects from git, pip install the requirements files, and work just like the rest of us on his Windows machine. It required a lot of a figuring stuff out, but he kept great notes and can now go from a new install to a full environment by just following his notes.

RyanMcGreal4• 15 years ago

Internal web applications at work. It's more clunky and cumbersome to install packages on Windows than *nix and the command line is underpowered and less integrated, but the benefits (and sheer joy) of programming in Python are worth the slight impedance mismatch.

natmaster• 15 years ago

Not only do I use Python on Windows, I use python at my job at Microsoft.

tjr• 15 years ago

Avionics simulation software.

runjake• 15 years ago

Google App Engine, random stuff I write, and system scripting when PowerShell is annoying me. It works well on Windows.

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

If you go to PyCon, you'll see a _ton of Windows User, a ton of Mac users and a ton of Linux users. The Python community is impressively OS agnostic. The startup community less so.

I dev on Win because of the better multiple monitor support. I run using 3 large monitors on my Dev box, that I can rotate between landscape and portrait mode at will.

Python is my language of choice for WebDev, tools, etc...

stoney2• 15 years ago

I use Python on Windows for various things, primarily number crunching. Mostly I use it as a better (for me) Matlab, but it's also handy for random scripting tasks.

And why do I use Windows? Excel.

pragmatic3• 15 years ago

Scripting.

I also script Android and *nix with it.

I see it as a universal shell.

I'm also writing a cross platform program in it. It's support for Windows features is quite good. (no gui stuff so I can't speak to that).

In the future I want to try pygame (or other gaming framework) if I can find the time.

malkia• 15 years ago

Lots of AutoDesk products are extended with Python, like Maya and MotionBuilder

And in our studio, for good and bad, Windows is mostly deployed (audio guys might consider getting Macs again, as there was not proper support for ProTools on recent Windows versions)

tansey• 15 years ago

Pretty awesome that numpy and scipy are now supported by .NET. Does anyone know if the nltk is supported yet?

runevault• 15 years ago

Kinda makes me wonder how easy it'd be to use them with c# and other .net languages, for anyone who was coming over from Python and already comfortable with those libs.

silverbax884• 15 years ago

Awesome. Now I can do my robotics programming in the best IDE in existence. Sorry, Eclipse, I love you and we're great together, but you're no Visual Studio.

blibble• 15 years ago

and VS is no IDEA, which also has Python support!

silverbax884• 15 years ago

You mean IntelliJIDEA, right? That intellisense is really nice, I loved it when I saw it VS too. Get a kick out of Java devs who think it's new.

Sorry, not trying to bust on you, but I write in all these IDEs...I still love VS.

But hey, C# is just a copy of Java, so maybe it evens out.

WayneDB2• 15 years ago

IDEA's Python support seems very poor compared to VS. I installed the IDEA Python plugin and when I typed "import " it said "no suggestions". Same thing when I typed "sys." and when I created a new Python project, it couldn't find any interpreters installed on my system.

Meanwhile in VS, after installing the Python plugin all of that stuff just worked the first time.

francoisdevlin• 15 years ago

You spelled vi wrong

mahmud• 15 years ago

I don't see "vi-mode" in my site-lisp.

sigstop5• 15 years ago

I'm sure this was meant as a joke, but, the downmods still make me sad. I used VS for some classes in school and at my first job and it made me a worse programmer. It took years to undo the damage. In my opinion, as a developer, and in my experience in working with a lot of other developers, terminal + vim + build tools (gcc/javac/python, etc) is far superior compared to VS.

pragmatic3• 15 years ago

Thanks for hijacking this thread.

This is quite an awesome tool that MSFT has released. But the top N comments are about the merits of IDE's vs vi then devolves into a pissing match about coding discipline.

mhb2• 15 years ago

Can I use it for remote debugging of an AWS server? Like Komodo IDE?

mhb2• 15 years ago

Doesn't look like it:

Our remote debugging solution depends on msvsmon to provide the attach-to-process functionality, so remote debugging doesn't work on linux out of the box. However, given a process attach infrastructure on linux you could reuse our debugger.py to talk back to Visual Studio, as that is a simple socket connection. If you wanted to implement that and contribute it back we'd definitely look at taking it.

http://pytools.codeplex.com/discussions/259591

joeyespo2• 15 years ago

This is fantastic. Been using it for a few weeks now. Coming from a bare bones editor (Crimson Editor :), it's been a wonderful experience.

alok-g• 15 years ago

samyvilar• 15 years ago

Interesting, I guess this shows how popular python has become, tried a couple IDEs, so far pycharm, based on intellij, is one of the better ones if any one has a better one would love to try it ...

joeyespo2• 15 years ago

The only complaint I have is that the installer hijacks the Python icons. I don't exactly care what program .py files open with since I usually drag/drop them into the appropriate editor and run Python apps from the command line. But I grew quite fond of CPython's file icons and they're much different after Python Tools installation.

The workaround is to reinstall Python after installing Python Tools.

Python Tools for Visual Studio

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