Microsoft for Python Developers Blog
Read the latest updates about all things Python at Microsoft
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Python support in Visual Studio 2017
[Updated 7 March 2015] We have now released the preview version of Visual Studio 2017 referred to in this post. Please see our release blog post for more information. Over the last few months, Visual Studio 2017 has been in preview and many of you have been trying it out and providing feedback. We are very appreciative of everyone who has taken the time to do this. As many noticed, during an update in January we removed Python support from the VS 2017 Release Candidate. This was done suddenly and without warning, and for that we apologize. We will be making a preview available at launch, and Python support wi...
Publish to Azure in Visual Studio 2017
This week, those of you using Visual Studio 2017 RC will be getting an update notification. This is a refresh of RC, with a whole lot of improvements and fixes (based on your feedback), and a selection of features that didn't quite make the initial RC release. For Python support, we've largely focused on bugfixes. There were 34 bugs resolved for this refresh, which we hope will give you a noticeably more stable and performant product. However, there was one big and dramatic change that we want to draw some attention to, as it may impact your workflow. While many Python developers are quite happy never publishin...
A template for using Python on Azure Web Apps
Back in August we had a blog post on using newer versions of Python on Azure App Service. In that post we outlined why we were working on this alternative approach to using Python on Azure App Service and provided basic templates of key files you needed to make the approach work. While that approach still works, we realized there were some steps that more arduous than necessary which were common to all websites using Azure Web Apps. Our search to simplify the creation of an Azure Web App using a new release of Python led us to the Cookiecutter project. We realized that a lot of the steps in getting started invol...
Creating Apps from Templates: Cookiecutter in Visual Studio “15”
Cookiecutter is a popular Open Source templating engine that lets experts easily create highly customizable templates to help other users get started on a project. We have brought it to Visual Studio to reduce the time and effort it takes to stand-up apps, prototype experiences that integrate different services, or try out new frameworks. Now users can search, install, and generate projects from Cookiecutter templates within Visual Studio using the Cookiecutter Explorer tool. In this blog post, we will go through the flow of creating an Azure Web App project from its Cookiecutter template using this tool. As we g...
Python in Visual Studio “15” Preview 5
Last week, Visual Studio "15" Preview 5 was made available for download. This release has a number of exciting changes and improvements for Python developers that we are going to be covering over the next few weeks. Today's post will look at the new install experience, covering the improvements and the new options to be aware of. When you first run the Visual Studio "15" Preview 5 installer, rather than the traditional setup, you'll see a collection of workloads. Rather than giving you a default install with most features, we've broken the product up into a much more fine-grained set of components, each of which...
Microsoft’s participation in the 2016 Python core sprint
From September 5th to the 9th a group of Python core developers gathered for a sprint hosted at Instagram and sponsored by Instagram, Microsoft, and the Python Software Foundation. The goal was to spend a week working towards the Python 3.6.0b1 release, just in time for the Python 3.6 feature freeze on Monday, September 12, 2016. The inspiration for this sprint was the Need for Speed sprint held in Iceland a decade ago, where many performance improvements were made to Python 2.5. How time flies! That's the opening paragraph from the Python Insider blog post discussing the 2016 Python core sprint that recently too...
Upgrading Python on Azure App Service
App Service is Microsoft Azure's platform-as-a-service offering for web apps, whether they are sites accessed through a browser, REST APIs used by your own clients, or event-triggered processing. Many of you are already using Python to implement your apps on App Service (and rightly so!). When we first enabled Python on App Service we wanted to make it as easy as possible. So we went and installed the latest available versions on every host, so that you could just assume it was going to be present. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be a great long-term solution. Happily though, we found a better approach!...
Idiomatic Python: EAFP versus LBYL
One idiomatic practice in Python that often surprises people coming from programming languages where exceptions are considered, well, exceptional, is EAFP: "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission". Quickly, EAFP means that you should just do what you expect to work and if an exception might be thrown from the operation then catch it and deal with that fact. What people are traditionally used to is LBYL: "look before you leap". Compared to EAFP, LBYL is when you first check whether something will succeed and only proceed if you know it will work. If this all doesn't make sense from the prose alone, do...
Python and Django on Nano Server
This post is contributed by Refaat Issa from the Nano Server team, and was originally posted on their blog. Nano Server has also blogged about their support for MySQL and Node.js. One of Nano Server’s core scenarios is to serve as a lightweight OS for born-in-the-cloud applications running in a VM or a container. Nano Server already supports ASP.NET Core (aka ASP.NET 5) with IIS, node.js, and now, we’re happy to announce support for Python & Django. The instructions in this blog explain how to get Python & Django running on Nano Server. If you want to try this on a Nano Server VM, with Windows Server ...
