Data Science Pack for VS Code Bundles Python, Data and Copilot Tools -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Science Pack for VS Code Bundles Python, Data and Copilot Tools

By David Ramel
09/19/2024

Microsoft announced a new extension pack for Visual Studio Code that bundles tools for Python development, assisted by the AI-powered GitHub Copilot and a data wrangler.

The new Python Data Science pack, sporting 206 installs at the time of this writing, also comes with a data-centric component, so in total it bundles:

Python + Pylance: Provides rich support for the Python language such as IntelliSense, debugging, formatting, linting, code navigation, refactoring, variable explorer, test explorer, and more.
Jupyter: Used to create and edit Jupyter Notebooks, add and run code/markdown cells, render plots, create presentation-friendly versions of your notebook by exporting to HTML or PDF and more.
Data Wrangler: A code-centric data viewing and cleaning tool to explore, visualize, and clean tabular data.
GitHub Copilot: An AI pair programmer tool that helps you write code faster and smarter.

Those first three tools, Python, Pylance and Jupyter, are by far the most popular individual offerings in the entire Visual Studio Code Marketplace, combining for a total of about 328 million installs. That means the number of installs of Python-related tools for VS Code exceeds the population of the United States.

As Python is wildly popular among VS Code developers, VS Code is wildly popular among Python developers, having been named the No. 1 IDE/editor in a survey last year (see "VS Code and Python: A Natural Fit for Data Science").

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Main IDE/Editor *(source: JetBrains/Python Software Foundation).*

The new pack's description reads: "This extension pack is a one-stop shop to get tools for your data science workflows from preparing data, conducting data analysis, and visualizing data, to prototyping, evaluating, and training ML models."

While the new bundle is free, the GitHub Copilot tool is not, instead available as a free trial, so it's unclear how that plays out with the extension pack.

"This powerful pack brings together some of the most popular and essential VS Code extensions, making it your one-stop shop for all things data science in Python," said Microsoft's Rong Lu in a Sept. 18 announcement.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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