I’m delighted to announce that Don Jayamanne, the author of the most popular Python extension for Visual Studio Code, has joined Microsoft! Starting immediately, Microsoft will be publishing and supporting the extension. You will receive the update automatically, or visit our Visual Studio Marketplace page and click “Install”.

Python has a long history at Microsoft, starting with IronPython, Python For Visual Studio, the Python SDK for Azure, Azure Notebooks as well as contributing developer time and support to CPython.

While some people like using a full-featured IDE such as Visual Studio, others prefer to have a lighter weight, editor-centric experience such as Visual Studio Code. Don has been working on the Python extension part-time for the past couple of years. We were impressed by his work and have hired him to work on it full-time, along with other members of our Python team.

What does Microsoft Python team publishing the extension mean?

For all practical purposes the transition should be transparent to you. Additionally:

• The extension will remain open source and free
• Development will continue to be on GitHub, under the existing license
• More dev resources means (generally) faster turnaround on bug fixes and new features
• Official support will be provided by Microsoft

For this first release we’re focusing on fixing a number of existing issues and adding a few new features such as multi-root and status bar interpreter selection (a complete list of changes can be found in the changelog).

Note: If for whatever reason you would prefer to continue to use the extension as Don released it prior to joining Microsoft, you can uninstall the Python extension and then download the VSIX file and install it manually. Note that no further development will be done in the old GitHub repo.

We’re hiring for Visual Studio Code / Python!

We’re hiring devs immediately to continue and expand work on our Python support for Visual Studio Code. If you are passionate about developer tools and productivity, this could be an ideal endeavor! The ideal candidate has a mix of IDE (editor/debugger), JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python in their background, and experience writing plugins for VS Code is a big plus. If you bring something really special to the table we can consider remote, but ideally you would plan to relocate to our Redmond offices. If interested, please send your resume to pythonjobs@microsoft.com with the subject: “VSC-Python”.