News

Popular Python Extension for the Visual Studio Code Editor Boosts Debugging

The Python extension for the open source Visual Studio Code editor -- the most popular offering available in the marketplace -- has been updated with improved debugging functionality.

With more than 8.3 million installations, the extension reflects VS Code's embrace of Python, which involved hiring the original developer of the then-independent extension, taking over the project as its own, hiring more development help to further its functionality and bundling it with the Anaconda Python distribution.

The VS Code team published documentation for the extension that says: "It leverages all of VS Code's power to provide auto complete and IntelliSense, linting, debugging, and unit testing, along with the ability to easily switch between Python environments, including virtual and conda environments."

The team has continually improved the capabilities of the extension, and in the March update highlighted improved debugging functionality.

While the previous release (February) introduced a preview version of the debugger with limited feature support, the new release adds new enhancements to the preview.

"Debug configurations have been added for more app types: Django, PySpark, Pyramid, Watson and Scrapy," said Dan Taylor of Microsoft's Python engineering team. "The preview debugger is also now bundled with the extension so you no longer need to manually install ptvsd to try it out, simply add one of the Experimental Debugger configurations and start debugging."

Also, he said, the new release adds support for Django template debugging, support for debugging unit tests and Jinja template debugging support for apps other than Flask, in addition to closing 61 issues.

Taylor highlighted some of those issues and minor enhancements:

  • Pipenv improvements: added the ability to read Pipfile name from the environment variable, development-time packages are installed into dev-packages
  • Add support for the "it" locale
  • Improved extension load time
  • Unit test discovery banner is suppressed when test discovery failure is caused by syntax errors in test code
  • Conda installer is not used in non-conda environments
  • Prevent extension from displaying the wrong interpreter
  • Fixed high CPU Usage in wmic process on Windows
  • Stop autocomplete from appearing in comments

All of those and more are detailed in the changelog.

Developers who discover their own issues can submit them on the extension's GitHub site.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • 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.

  • Introduction to .NET Aspire

    Two Microsoft experts will present on the cloud-native application stack designed to simplify the development of distributed systems in .NET at the Visual Studio Live! developer conference coming to Las Vegas next month.

  • Microsoft Previews Copilot AI for Open-Source Eclipse IDE

    Catering to Java jockeys, Microsoft is yet again expanding the sprawling reach of its Copilot-branded AI assistants, previewing a coding tool for the open-source Eclipse IDE.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events