Data Viewer Enhancements Lead VS Code April Jupyter Update -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Viewer Enhancements Lead VS Code April Jupyter Update

By David Ramel
04/16/2021

Viewing data is easier in the April update of Jupyter tooling in Visual Studio Code.

That Jupyter tooling comes in the Jupyter extension available in the VS Code Marketplace, with said extension also included in the umbrella Python extension, now approaching 34.5 million installations, by far and away the most popular VS Code tool.

Formerly called IPython Notebook, the open source Jupyter project helps developers easily combine Markdown text, visualizations, narrative text and executable Python source code such as equations in Notebooks.

In the latest regular monthly update to Jupyter, the Data Viewer was the focus of new functionality, which includes:

Refresh: Developers making changes to data can just click on a new refresh button instead of having to close and reopen the viewer.
New data types: The Data Viewer now supports viewing PyTorch and TensorFlow Tensor data types. (Coincidentally, PyTorch is the current focus of Dr. James McCaffrey, of Microsoft Research, in The Data Science Lab section of Visual Studio Magazine.)
UI: In an effort to make the viewer more aesthetically pleasing, the filter box now appears at the heading of each column, whose content can be sorted in either ascending or descending orders by clicking on a heading. Also individual cell content can be copied with a click.
Data slicing: Devs can view any 2D slice of higher dimensional data. Higher-dimensional data (for example 3D, numpy ndarray, PyTorch Tensor or TensorFlow EagerTensor types) can also be viewed with a new data slicing panel that opens by default.

Native Notebooks, available in VS Code Insiders builds, is also improved with:

Multiple cell selection: That's done with the the mouse (Shift + Click) or the keyboard shortcut (Shift + Arrow) when in cell selection mode.
Quick collapse: Devs can now hover over to the left of each cell and double-click to collapse its elements, instead of having to open the overflow menu in the cell toolbar.
Customizable diffing: "Users can now customize the type of information that is surfaced when diffing notebooks and have the option to hide metadata and output differences! To customize your filters, simply open the overflow menu located in the top right of the rich diff text editor and select the sections on the notebook you would like included!"

See the announcement post for more information on all of the above and other changes, enhancements and fixes.

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.