Visual Studio Code Gets New Python Debugger -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio Code Gets New Python Debugger

By David Ramel
03/20/2020

The March 2020 update to Microsoft's wildly popular Python extension for Visual Studio Code focused on improving quality via bug fixes, but it did introduce a new debugger.

Python language functionality is provided to vS Code through the Python extension for Visual Studio Code, far and away the most popular offering in the editor's marketplace with more than 17.5 million installations. It serves up language goodies like IntelliSense, linting, debugging, code navigation, code formatting, Jupyter notebook support, refactoring, variable explorer, test explorer, snippets, and so on.

Microsoft years ago went "all in" on Python, and the support effort has resulted in VS Code gaining Python developer mind share.

Updated monthly, the tool's latest iteration introduces the new debugger, called debugpy.

"We're excited to announce that in this release we're including a new debugger, debugpy. The debugger team has put a lot of effort into making it a faster and even more reliable Python debugger," said Luciana de Melo e Abud, program manager, Python extension in Visual Studio Code, in a March 19 blog post.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Attaching to Local Process *(source: Microsoft).*

Also, a new configuration experience simplifies the process of attaching the debugger to local processes, which can be problematic if a developer doesn't have control over the application that spawned the process.

For more information about the new debugger, including how to transition from ptvsd (the previous debugger), API changes, CLI references, allowed debug configurations and so on, a debugpy wiki page is available.

Other changes and improvements ranged from "Remove extra lines at the end of the file when formatting with Black" to "Show quickfixes for launch.json."

Development of the VS Code Python extension is carried out on GitHub.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.