What is difference between Python & Pylance VS Code extensions? - python

I just shifted from my old bud Sublime to VSCode. I really liked the way it works and the features it has. I'm a newbie python developer. I found two popular python extensions for VSCode: Python, and PyLance. My question is, What is the difference between Python and Pylance extension? I searched a lot but didn't find a good comparison.

As an editor, VSCode cannot recognize all languages and many functions cannot be implemented independently. Therefore, when we use Python code in VSCode, we need to install the 'Python' extension, which provides us with functions such as code completion, support for Jupyter notebooks, debugging Python code, etc. Therefore, the Python extension is one of the necessary dependencies for using Python in VSCode.
The extension 'Pylance' needs to be used in conjunction with the Python extension. It cannot be used independently in VSCode. It mainly provides outstanding Python language services (other Python language services such as "Microsoft", "Jedi", don't need to install specific extensions, they can be used as-is after installation). At the same time, it also provides functions such as docstrings. Therefore, the Pylance extension is not a necessary condition, but a recommended extension.
It is recommended that you install and use these two extensions. They are not opposite extensions, they are VSCode extensions that cooperate with each other (To be precise, the 'Pylance' extension relies on the 'Python' extension to use).
And for more related information, you could refer to the VS Code docs on: Using Python in VSCode and Python and Pylance.

Related

Using python project in c# application

I'm looking for a way to call my python project and display the console on my c# app.
My python project is a bit particular, i use some specific librairy, i even have to install a package whl not avalible with pip, avalible only with python3.7(not with 3.8) etc. So to run the project, i need python 3.7 exactly.
The problem is also that i want to deploy my c# app in ClickOnce to be use by clients, without having them to install a local python version.
I've seen on the net two ways to do work with python and c#, that both doesn't seem working for my need.
using python in c# app
1.Call python in a shell
I've imported the python project in my c# app, i've called the python.exe avalible in the venv and i've deployed the app. Everithing seems to work, but i discover that python executable in the venv refer to the local python installation and doesn't seem autonomus. So it was only working for me and not the clients.
Use IronPython in c#
Really far from working, starting by the encoding blowing from everywhere, even in imported librairy like numpy. I've referenced my venv librairy in SetSearchPaths(), and even with that, it's doesn't seem to work.
Any suggestions? The best way i think, would be to have a python.exe independant following the project that can load my venv.
Python.Included and the Numpy.NET package made with it may work for this:
https://github.com/henon/Python.Included
https://github.com/SciSharp/Numpy.NET
They are introduced in this post from 2019 and seem to be in active development today, https://medium.com/scisharp/using-python-libraries-in-net-without-a-python-installation-11124d6190cf
That solution does not use IronPython, but Python.NET: https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet
IronPython is an implementation of Python in C#, championed by others and then Microsoft itself back in 2010 era. Later Microsoft dropped it and largely the whole notion of supporting dynamic languages on .NET (they made a DLR system for it back then). It is very cool and works for pure Python code.
But NumPy and many useful and popular Python modules are written in C, using the C API of Python.org 's default C written Python implementation, aka. CPython. This is what Microsoft decided to back too instead, because C written Python modules don't work (easily and well) with IronPython. Also IronPython remains at Python 2.7.
Python.NET just bridges the .NET land with the normal CPython interpreter, so that you can call code cross the language boundary. So Numpy and everything works the same as with Python usually. Which is what you want.
Python.Included is one way to deploy that in C# projects - which may or may not work for you, but at least provides a starting point:
Python.Included is an automatic deployment mechanism for .NET packages
which depend on the embedded Python distribution. This allows
libraries depending on Python and/or Python packages to be deployed
via Nuget without having to worry about any local Python
installations.
It packages embedded Python (python-3.7.3-embed-amd64.zip) in its .NET
assembly and automatically deploys it in the user's home directory
upon first execution. On subsequent runs, it will find Python already
deployed and therefor doesn't install it again.
If you don't want to use that install mechanism, I think you can just bundle the CPython interpreter with your C# application and use the Python.NET mechanism to call that from your app's directory instead.

Autocomplete for Automation objects in VS Code and Python

I have the Python Extensions for Windows installed. Within the PythonWin IDE I can get autocomplete on Automation objects (specifically, objects created with win32com.client.Dispatch):
How can I get the same autocomplete in VS Code?
I am using the Microsoft Python extension.
The Python Windows Extensions has a tool called COM Makepy, which apparently generates Python representations of Automation objects, but I can't figure out how to use it.
Update
Apparently, the Microsoft Python extension uses Jedi for autocompletion.
I've filed an issue on the extension project on Github.
Note that in general I have Intellisense in Python; it's only the Intellisense on Automation objects that I am missing.
Review
I have confirmed your problem in VSCode, although it may be possible IntelliSense works fine. Note Ctrl+Space invokes suggestions for a pre-defined variable:
However, there does not appear to be public attributes available for win32com.client by default. This may be why IntelliSense does not appear to work.
Test
Having installed win32com for Python 3.6, I have confirmed the following code in Jupyter notebook, IPython console and the native Python REPL:
import win32com.client
app = win32com.client.Dispatch("Word.Application")
len(dir(app))
# 55
[x for x in dir(app) if not x.startswith("_")]
# []
This issue of hidden attributes is not a new. Please confirm this test in another environment/IDE. It may be your environment or particular version of PythonWin pre-loads certain variables in the global namespace.
Verify the following:
The Python extension is installed
A Python interpreter is selected
A Python file is selected; this starts up the Python server
References
Post by the extension's creator for troubleshooting autocompletion issues.
Thread on how autocompletion works via PyScriptor
I don't think that the example you show with PythonWin is easily reproducible in VS Code. The quick start guide of win32com itself (cited below) says, its only possible with a COM browser or the documentation of the product (Word in this case). The latter one is unlikely, so PythonWin is probably using a COM browser to find the properties. And because PythonWin and win32com come in the same package, its not that unlikely that PythonWin has a COM browser built in.
How do I know which methods and properties are available?
Good question. This is hard! You need to use the documentation with the
products, or possibly a COM browser. Note however that COM browsers
typically rely on these objects registering themselves in certain
ways, and many objects to not do this. You are just expected to know.
If you wanted the same functionality from the VS Code plugin a COM browser would have to be implemented into Jedi (IntelliSense of the VS Code plugin).
Edit: I found this suggestion, on how a auto-complete, that can find these hidden attributes, could be done:
These wrappers do various things that make static analysis difficult,
unless we were to special case them. The general solution for such
cases is to run to a breakpoint and work in the live runtime state.
The auto-completer should then include the complete list of symbols
because it inspects the runtime.
The conversation is from an mailing list of the python IDE wingwide. Here you can see, that they implemented the above mentioned approach:
I think your problem is related to defining Python interpreter.
Choose proper Python interpreter by executing python interpreter command in VS Code command palette by pressing f1 or ctrl+shift+p key.

Python Code Completion

After using C# for long time I finally decided to switch to Python.
The question I am facing for the moment has to do about auto-complete.
I guess I am spoiled by C# and especially from resharper and I was expecting something similar to exist for Python.
My editor of choice is emacs and after doing some research I found autocomplete.pl, yasnippet and rope although it is not clear to me if and how they can be installed in a cygwin based system which is what I use since all the related documentation appears to be linux specific...
The version of emacs I currently use is 23.2.1 which bundles the python mode that although useful is far behind from whatever research has to offer.
My question to python users has to do about how common is autocomplete vs manual typing (using M-/ where possible) ?
I am thinking about just memorizing python build-in functions like len, append, extend etc. and revert close to a pre-autocomplete editing mode. How different such an approach is from what other pythonistas are doing?
I found this post
My Emacs Python environment
to be the most useful and comprehensive list of instructions and references on how to setup a decent Python development environment in Emacs regardless of OS platform. It is still a bit of work to setup but at least it covers the popular packages and components generally recommended for Python in Emacs that provide auto-completion functionality.
I loosely used this post as a guide to do the setup on my Windows machine with Emacs 23.2.1 and Python 2.6.5. Although, I also have Cygwin installed in some cases instead of running the *nix shell commands mentioned in the post, I just download the packages via a web browser, unzip them with 7zip, and copy them to my Emacs' plugin directory.
Also, to install Pymacs, Rope, and Ropemacs, I used Python's EasyInstall package manager. To use it, I downloaded and installed the setuptools package using the Windows install version. Once installed, at the command line, cd to their respective download locations and run the command
easy_install .
instead of the shell commands shown in the post.
Generally, I saved any *.el files in my ~\.emacs.d\plugins (e.g. in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\.emacs.d\) and then updated my .emacs file to reference them as documented in the post.
Despite all this, on occasion, I've used DreamPie since it does have overall better auto-completion out of the box than my Emacs setup.
I'm spoiled by Intellisense too. The PyDev extensions for Eclipse offer a pretty good auto-complete substitute.
I find that PyDev + Eclipse can meet most of my needs. There is also PyCharm from the Intellij team. PyCharm has the added advantage of smooth integration with git.
I've been using PyScripter, an IDE for Windows, for a while now, and have found it very good. It has autocompletion among many other features. It's written in Delphi -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- it just bothers me a bit, though...
Take a look at Spyderlib, support most of the features including code completion
IMO, by far the easiest way to take advantage of the python tools available for emacs is to take advantage of the defaults that are all set up at:
https://github.com/gabrielelanaro/emacs-for-python
I actually took the time to get pymacs and ropemacs and python-mode all working independently before finding that little gem, and now I rely on it entirely for all my python based customizations. If you are new, I would definitely start there.

How do I embed a python library in a C++ app?

I've embedded python on a mobile device successfully, but now how do I include a python library such as urllib?
Additionally, how can I include my own python scripts without a PYTHONPATH?
(please note: python is not installed on this system)
The easiest way is to create a .zip file containing all the python code you need and add this to your process's PYTHONPATH environment variable (via setenv()) prior to initializing the embedded Python interpreter. Usage of .pyd libraries can be done similarly by adding them to the same directory as the .zip and including the directory in the PYTHONPATH as well.
Usage of the setenv() call can cause trouble on Windows if you're mixing c-runtime versions. I spent many aggrivating hours learing that setenv() only sets the environment variables for the version of the c-runtime your compiler ships with. So if, for example, Python was built with VC++ 2005 and your compiler is VC++ 2008, you'll need to use an alternative mechanism. Browsing the sources for py2exe and/or PyInstaller may provide you with a better solution (since you're doing essentially the same thing as these tools) but a simple alternative is to "cheat" by using PyRun_SimpleString() to set the module search path from within Python itself.
snprintf(buff, "import sys\nsys.path.append("%s")\n", py_zip_filename)
PyRun_SimpleString(buff)

How do I set up a Python development environment on Linux?

I'm a .NET developer who knows very little about Python, but want to give it a test drive for a small project I'm working on.
What tools and packages should I install on my machine? I'm looking for a common, somewhat comprehensive, development environment.
I'll likely run Ubuntu 9.10, but I'm flexible. If Windows is a better option, that's fine too.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not looking for the bare minimum to get a Python program to run. I wouldn't expect a newbie .NET dev to use notepad and a compiler. I'd recommend Visual Studio, NUnit, SQL Server, etc.
Your system already has Python on it. Use the text editor or IDE of your choice; I like vim.
I can't tell you what third-party modules you need without knowing what kind of development you will be doing. Use apt as much as you can to get the libraries.
To speak to your edit:
This isn't minimalistic, like handing a .NET newbie notepad and a compiler: a decent text editor and the stdlib are all you really need to start out. You will likely need third-party libraries to develop whatever kind of applications you are writing, but I cannot think of any third-party modules all Python programmers will really need or want.
Unlke the .NET/Windows programming world, there is no one set of dev tools that stands above all others. Different people use different editors a whole lot. In Python, a module namespace is fully within a single file and project organization is based on the filesystem, so people do not lean on their IDEs as hard. Different projects use different version control software, which has been booming with new faces recently. Most of these are better than TFS and all are 1000 times better than SourceSafe.
When I want an interactive session, I use the vanilla Python interpreter. Various more fancy interpreters exist: bpython, ipython, IDLE. bpython is the least fancy of these and is supposed to be good about not doing weird stuff. ipython and IDLE can lead to strange bugs where code that works in them doens't work in normal Python and vice-versa; I've seen this first hand with IDLE.
For some of the tools you asked about and some others
In .NET you would use NUnit. In Python, use the stdlib unittest module. There are various third-party extensions and test runners, but unittest should suit you okay.
If you really want to look into something beyond this, get unittest2, a backport of the 2.7 version of unittest. It has incorporated all the best things from the third-party tools and is really neat.
In .NET you would use SQL Server. In Python, you may use PostgreSQL, MySQL, sqlite, or some other database. Python specifies a unified API for databases and porting from one to another typically goes pretty smoothly. sqlite is in the stdlib.
There are various Object Relational Models to make using databases more abstracted. SQLAlchemy is the most notable of these.
If you are doing network programming, get Twisted.
If you are doing numerical math, get numpy and scipy.
If you are doing web development, choose a framework. There are about 200000: Pylons, zope, Django, CherryPy, werkzeug...I won't bother starting an argument by recommending one. Most of these will happily work with various servers with a quick setting.
If you want to do GUI development, there are quite a few Python bindings. The stdlib ships with Tk bindings I would not bother with. There are wx bindings (wxpython), GTK+ bindings (pygtk), and two sets of Qt bindings. If you want to do native Windows GUI development, get IronPython and do it in .NET. There are win32 bindings, but they'll make you want to pull your hair out trying to use them directly.
In order to reduce the chance of effecting/hosing the system install of python, I typically install virtualenv on the ubuntu python install. I then create a virtualenv in my home directory so that subsequent packages I install via pip or easy_install do not effect the system installation. And I add the bin from that virtualenv to my path via .bashrc
$ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages ~/local
$ PATH=~/local/bin:$PATH #<----- add this to .bashrc to make it permanent
$ easy_install virtualenv #<--- so that project environments are based off your local environment rather than the system, probably not necessary
Install your favorite editor, I like emacs + rope, but editors are a personal preference and there are plenty of choices.
When I start a new project/idea I create a new virtual environment for that project, so that I don't effect dependencies anywhere else. Since I would hate for some of my projects to break due to an upgrade of a library both that project and the new one depends on.
~/projects $ virtualenv --no-site-packages my_new_project.env
~/projects/my_new_project.env $ source bin/activate
(my_new_project.env)~/projects/my_new_project.env $ easy_install paste ipython #whatever else I think I need
(my_new_project.env)~/projects/my_new_project.env $ emacs ./ & # start hacking
When creating a new package...in order to have something that will be easy_installable/pippable use paster create
(my_new_project.env)~/projects/my_new_project.env$ paster create new_package
(my_new_project.env)~/projects/my_new_project.env/new_package$ python setup.py develop new_package
That's the common stuff as far as I can think of it. Everything else would be editor/version control tool specific
Since I'm accustomed to Eclipse, I find Eclipse + PyDev convenient for Python. For quick computations, Idle is great.
I've used Python on Windows and on Ubuntu, and Linux is much cleaner.
If you launch a terminal and type python you'll get an interpreter, where you can start trying stuff.
Just in case you haven't seen it, check out the book Dive Into Python, is free on-line.
http://www.diveintopython.org/
Follow the examples in the book using the interpreter.
For storing your work you could use any editor; Vim or EMACS could be the most powerful, but also the most difficult to learn at first. If you want a more "traditional" IDE, you could try WingIDE.
http://www.wingware.com/
After you start to get more comfortable with python you should try an enhanced interpreter; try ipython.
http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/
When you start to develop a more serious project you'll need to get additional modules. Here you have two options; 1) Use your distribution tools to install additional modules; or 2) Download the modules you need directly from their sites and install them manually. You'll be responsible to upgrade them of course.
You'll have to decide for yourself which way to go. Personally I prefer to download and install additional modules manually.
Python (duh), setuptools or pip, virtualenv, and an editor. I suggest geany, but that's just me. And of course, any other Python modules you'll need.
Getting to Python from .NET world
Jumping into the Linux world from a .NET / WIndows background can be a bit disconcerting (but I do encourage you to keep trying Linux)
But I would suggest to anyone coming from Windows, to stick with Windows for a little while. goto www.Activestate.com and download their Python package - it includes the full win32com extentions by Mark Hammond and it also includes a complete, fast IDE "pythonwin"
I have done real professional development with just this setup alone on a windows box - one 14MB .msi and off you go !
Now to use Python on the DLR (Dynamic common language runtime) you need to download IronPython. THis is a seperate interpreter, that was also originally written by Mark Hammond at Microsoft and is at ironpython.org.
With this you can run code like (from wikipedia) ::
import clr
clr.AddReference("System.Windows.Forms")
from System.Windows.Forms import MessageBox
MessageBox.Show("Hello World")
Now you can access any .NET code from python.
If you're just starting out with Python, I'd actually argue against bringing in the complexity of virtualenv (which I think can be pretty overwhelming), at least until you've got a firm grasp of Python basics (especially regarding library/dependency management).
If you're using Ubuntu and the Gnome desktop environment, gedit is the default (gui) text editor, and has great support for Python built in. So my recommendation is to start with the pre-installed Python and gedit (which is pretty extensible on its own).
You don't need much. Python comes with "Batteries Included."
Visual Studio == IDLE. You already have it. If you want more IDE-like environment, install Komodo Edit.
NUnit == unittest. You already have it in the standard library.
SQL Server == sqlite. You already have it in the standard library.
Stop wasting time getting everything ready. It's already there in the basic Python installation.
Get to work.
Linux, BTW, is primarily a development environment. It was designed and built by developers for developers. Windows is an end-user environment which has to be supplemented for development.
Linux was originally focused on developers. All the tools you need are either already there or are part of simple yum or RPM installs.
You would probably like to give NetBeans Python IDE a shot. You can choose to use either Windows/Linux.
Database: sqlite (inbuilt). You might want SQLAlchemy though.
GUI: tcl is inbuilt, but wxPython or pyQt are recommended.
IDE: I use idle (inbuilt) on windows, TextMate on Mac, but you might like PyDev. I've also heard good things about ulipad.
Numerics: numpy.
Fast inline code: lots of options. I like boost weave (part of scipy), but you could look into ctypes (to use dlls), Cython, etc.
Web server: too many options. Django (plus Apache) is the biggest.
Unit testing: inbuilt.
Pyparsing, just because.
BeautifulSoup (or another good HTML parser).
hg, git, or some other nice VC.
Trac, or another bug system.
Oh, and StackOverflow if you have any questions.
Pycharm Community is worth to try.

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