This week, those of you using Visual Studio 2017 RC will be getting an update notification. This is a refresh of RC, with a whole lot of improvements and fixes (based on your feedback), and a selection of features that didn't quite make the initial RC release. For Python support, we've largely focused on bugfixes. There were 34 bugs resolved for t...
Back in August we had a blog post on using newer versions of Python on Azure App Service. In that post we outlined why we were working on this alternative approach to using Python on Azure App Service and provided basic templates of key files you needed to make the approach work. While that approach still works, we realized there were some steps th...
Cookiecutter is a popular Open Source templating engine that lets experts easily create highly customizable templates to help other users get started on a project. We have brought it to Visual Studio to reduce the time and effort it takes to stand-up apps, prototype experiences that integrate different services, or try out new frameworks. Now users...
Last week, Visual Studio "15" Preview 5 was made available for download. This release has a number of exciting changes and improvements for Python developers that we are going to be covering over the next few weeks. Today's post will look at the new install experience, covering the improvements and the new options to be aware of. When you first ru...
From September 5th to the 9th a group of Python core developers gathered for a sprint hosted at Instagram and sponsored by Instagram, Microsoft, and the Python Software Foundation. The goal was to spend a week working towards the Python 3.6.0b1 release, just in time for the Python 3.6 feature freeze on Monday, September 12, 2016. The inspiration fo...
App Service is Microsoft Azure's platform-as-a-service offering for web apps, whether they are sites accessed through a browser, REST APIs used by your own clients, or event-triggered processing. Many of you are already using Python to implement your apps on App Service (and rightly so!). When we first enabled Python on App Service we wanted to ma...
One idiomatic practice in Python that often surprises people coming from programming languages where exceptions are considered, well, exceptional, is EAFP: "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission". Quickly, EAFP means that you should just do what you expect to work and if an exception might be thrown from the operation then catch it and...
This post is contributed by Refaat Issa from the Nano Server team, and was originally posted on their blog. Nano Server has also blogged about their support for MySQL and Node.js. One of Nano Server’s core scenarios is to serve as a lightweight OS for born-in-the-cloud applications running in a VM or a container. Nano Server already supports ASP...
Carl Kadie, Ph.D., is a research developer in Microsoft Research/TnR working on Genomics. Lambda expressions provide a way to pass functionality into a function. Sadly, Python puts two annoying restrictions on lambda expressions. First, lambdas can only contain an expression, not statements. Second, lambdas can't be serialized to disk. T...
This coming weekend is the start of PyCon US 2016 in Portland, USA. And as usual, we've sponsored the conference and will be bringing some of our engineering team. Here's where you'll be able to find us: Booth For many people, the main attraction is the Expo Hall. Here most of the sponsoring organizations will have booths set up to tell you about...
