Microsoft Livestream Series Bolsters Python in VS Code (250 Million Installs) -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Livestream Series Bolsters Python in VS Code (250 Million Installs)

By David Ramel
01/11/2023

The three most popular extensions in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace are for Python coding, totaling more than 176 million installs.

Leading that list is the main Python tool, accounting for more than 74 million of those installs, with the others being Jupyter (for working with Notebooks -- 55 million) and the Pylance language server with 47 million. Two other tools in the top six are also related to Python, accounting for another 73 million installs. Taking into account hundreds of other Python tools, the total number of Python-related tool downloads must be around 250 million.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** VS Code Marketplace *(source: Microsoft).*

The company's dev team has been quite active in supporting that community, and those efforts are continuing in the new year with an upcoming livestream series devoted to the super-popular programming language and Microsoft's equally super-popular, open source-based, cross-platform code editor that acts like an IDE thanks to all those extensions, VS Code. The latter has been named the No. 1 development tool overall in major coding surveys.

Called the Python Pulse, the monthly livestream series will kick off Jan. 13, tackling news in the Azure/VS Code/Python tech ecosystem and featuring special segments with guests.

Microsoft's dev team said the new program was launched because it loves the programming language and its impact on the world, with the livestream series being a new way to share its passion for the language with the community.

"Microsoft aims to build fast, feature-rich language support for Python projects in the Microsoft ecosystem," said the company's Dawn Wages, product manager in the Python community, in a Jan. 9 announcement post. "Our teams across Microsoft are committed to helping every technologist succeed -- students, enterprise and startups alike. The Python Pulse will be a way for developers to interact with the teams behind the products. We value the work our Microsoft MVPs and community partners bring. The Python Pulse will showcase the great work that sets our teams apart and how we provide an unmatched developer experience."

Wages, who will host the livestream series, kicks things off Friday with guest Pamela Fox, Microsoft cloud advocate, who will present on PostgreSQL in Dev Containers and Codespaces.

"Dev Containers and Codespaces allow you to open and clone in a local or cloud-hosted dev container," the event's description reads. "You're now able to take advantage of the VS Code full development features -- including support for the SQLTools extension and Postgres Extension in Codespaces (dev containers) where you can make decisions for and query your database with Postgres or SQLTools extensions." More details about the event are presented in a GitHub repo.

Other events will include:

Advanced features in GitHub Codespaces and Dev Containers
Azure Developer CLI, from GitHub to Cloud with Python
The VS Code Python Extension Team's Python Tools Template
Python and the Humanities
Python Cloud Developer Advocates
Testing with Playwright and Python: A conversation with Python Consultants and Advocates

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.