We are pleased to announce that the June 2020 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. If you already have the Python extension installed, you can also get the latest update by restarting Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.
In this release we worked on new features such as run by line and a start page, in addition to addressing 53 issues. If you’re interested, you can check the full list of improvements in our changelog.
Run By Line
We’re excited that in this release, we’re introducing run-by-line, a simplified way for troubleshooting issues in Notebook cells. To help diagnose your Notebook code, run-by-line lets you step through the code in your cells in line-by-line fashion and view the state of your variables at each step via the variable explorer or data tips (hovering your mouse over the variable).
To start a session, click the run-by-line icon to the right of the run-cell icon in the cell. Once in a run-by-line session, you can run the currently highlighted line of code by pressing the same icon again. To exit, click the stop button next to the run-by-line icon in the cell.
We’re shipping the feature as experimental in this release. To try it out, add the following line to your User settings (View > Command Palette… and run Preferences: Open Settings (JSON)):
"python.experiments.optInto": ["RunByLine - experiment"]
Afterwards, reload the window (View > Command Palette… and run Developer: Reload Window).
Python Start Page
The start page brings all the most common actions for the Python extension to an easily accessible page. It will highlight our monthly release notes so you can keep up to date about all our latest features, changes and tutorials (for example our tutorial for data science https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/data-science-tutorial), and showcase features in our sample notebook. You can access the page anytime through the “Open Start Page” command (View > Command Palette… and run Python: Open Start Page). In future releases this page will start automatically launching for anyone who newly downloads the extension or anytime there is an extension update.
