Microsoft has implemented a large number of improvements and bug fixes in a popular extension of Visual Studio Code. The extension in question is the Python programming language extension. Improvements have also been made to the Java extension for the same editor.
Visual Studio Code (VS code) is the open source edition of Visual Studio. It is used by more and more developers. The editor is known for its user friendliness and clarity, and with the support of multiple programming languages Visual Studio has had a big boost.
The popular Python for VS Code extension has been installed 15 million times from the VS Code extension marketplace. This makes it by far the most popular extension. Also a good reason for Microsoft to give a little more attention to the support of this extension.
Jupyter Notebooks
The update that has now been released contains no less than 59 improvements and bug fixes. These include the ability to select kernels in the Jupyter Notebooks and the performance improvements in the Jupyter Notebook Editor.
Jupyter Notebooks may not be known to everyone yet, but this is a popular tool for data science specialists. They can use it to program visualisations for data sources, and share the code they write with it directly. Support for Jupyter Notebooks was only added in October, including source control management, opening multiple files and automatically adding code using IntelliSense.
Based on the feedback received, performance has now improved significantly. Plus the ability to select a kernel. According to Microsoft, a Jupyter server is booted twice as fast and the creation of a new Jupyter notebook is much faster, as well as opening a notebook with a lot of code.
Microsoft has achieved these results by better caching of kernels and optimising the search function for Jupyter.
Java improvements
Finally, Microsoft has also improved its support for Java. For example, a new window has been developed with Call Hierarchy view, in which all calls to and from a function can be found. There have also been a number of improvements in the user interface and there is now support for Data Breakpoints. This, in combination with a new Java Test Runner extension, ensures that an application can be tested even better. This makes debugging easier.
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