Microsoft Updates Jupyter Notebook Preview for .NET Core -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Updates Jupyter Notebook Preview for .NET Core

By David Ramel
02/06/2020

Microsoft updated its preview project to enable working with Jupyter Notebooks in .NET Core with native programming languages C# and F#, providing new options for the traditional languages typically used, Python, R, Julia, Scala, etc.

Jupyter Notebooks are a popular approach to creating interactive environments -- like documents or canvases -- that can feature source code and markdown, or rich text formatting, and other media. The technology is often used for artificial intelligence, machine learning, Big Data and related projects.

Last November, Microsoft announced the first preview of the Jupyter-Notebooks-in-.NET-Core effort,

"The initial set of features we released needed to be relevant to developers, with Notebook experience as well as give users new to the experience a useful set of tools they would be eager to try," Microsoft said at the time.

Now (Feb. 6), the company announced Preview 2 of the .NET Notebook experience, along with a name change for Try .NET, an embeddable code runner that enables developers to explore .NET in the browser.

"As our scenarios grew in Try .NET, we wanted a new name that encompassed all our new experiences from the runnable snippets on the web powered by Blazor (as seen on the .NET page), to interactive documentation for .NET Core with the dotnet try global tool, to .NET Notebooks," said Maria Naggaga, senior program manager, in an announcement post. "Today we are announcing our official name change to .NET Interactive. .NET Interactive is a group of CLI tools and APIs that enable users to create interactive experiences across the web, markdown, and notebooks."

The effort now comprises global tools dotnet interactive (for .NET Notebooks) and dotnet try (for Workshops and offline docs, providing interactive markdown with a backing project), along with trydotnet.js -- an API not yet publicly available -- for documentation, currently consigned to internal Microsoft use. With the separation of efforts, there is now a .NET Interactive GitHub repo and a Try .NET repo.

Naggaga also announced:

New language support – PowerShell: "PowerShell notebooks combine the management capabilities of PowerShell with the rich visual experience of notebooks. The integration of PowerShell’s executable experience with rich text and visualization open up scenarios for PowerShell users to integrate and amplify their teaching, and support documents."
nteract.io support: "In addition to writing .NET Code in Jupyter Notebooks, users can now write their code in nteract. nteract is an open-source organization that builds SDKs, applications, and libraries that helps people make the most of interactive notebooks and REPLs. We are excited to have our .NET users take advantage of the rich REPL experience nteract provides,including the nteract desktop app." More on that is available in the ".NET Interactive with nteract" guidance.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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