Visual Studio Code's Python extension goes to Jupyter

A preview of next year's .NET Framework also emitted

The hardworking elves toiling in the corridors of Redmond loaded up Santa's sled with two more developer treats in the form of Python updates for Visual Studio Code and a fresh preview of the venerable .NET Framework.

Jupyter Ascending

Fresh from an early November release rammed with data science goodness, the team responsible for the Python extension for Visual Studio code has added more Jupyter support for a bit of festive fun.

Or at least as festive as data scientists get after a hard day's work spent crushing the dreams of children.

Jupyter itself is an open-source project (naturally) that arose from the IPython project and is geared towards data science across multiple programming languages including, of course, Python.

A key part of the Jupyter project is the Notebook concept – effectively a JSON document containing all manner of handy information such as code, mathematics and annotations. The aim is to document, execute and explain the results of the sometimes brain-melting data science involved.

In November, the VS Code Python team added the ability to import Jupyter Notebooks into the open-source code wrangler. Of course, the extension only pulled out actual Python code and Markdown blocks – there would be little point in extracting much else – but was directionally limited. It was possible to export the results spat out by code, but that was pretty much it.

The new release adds the ability to export Python code as Jupyter Notebooks, further closing the loop.

Support for Remote Jupyter Notebooks has also made an appearance, allowing resource-intensive computation to be offloaded elsewhere if needed.

.NET Framework – still not dead

Microsoft would really, really like you to be looking at the shiny open source .NET Core. However, if you are still shackled to the venerable .NET Framework, the software giant had a treat for those hardy souls unafraid of pre-production code, in the form of a fresh preview of version 4.8.

Running on all flavours of Windows 10 from version 1607 as well as Windows 8.1 and Windows 7, the preview brings a torrent of fixes to the framework as its 2019 release nears.

The promised DPI awareness continues to spread over Windows Forms, with the PropertyGrid and ToolStrip now understanding per monitor DPI. The Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) has received a fix for an infinite loop issue arising from the setting of the height of a listbox, among other improvements.

The Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Base Class Library (BCL) have also seen bugs squashed in what, in our experience, seems like a pretty stable release. Not that we'd let it anywhere near a production environment, of course.

Microsoft plans a few more releases of the aging framework over the coming months, meaning Build 3707 is not the last word on the thing. It will also make an appearance in the next update for Windows 10. ®