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At our annual Microsoft Connect event in November, we announced the General Availability of Visual Studio App Center, combining our best developer services, incuding Xamarin Test Cloud and HockeyApp, into one free, easy-to-use cloud service to help you ship better apps, faster.From building in the cloud to automatically testing on thousands of real devices, distributing to testers and app. Let us see how to create a simple bot application using Visual Studio 2017. You can integrate Microsoft Cognitive APIs into your Bot application, I have written a post on the same which you can find here. In my upcoming posts, I will share my experiments with Bots.
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Python is a popular programming language that is reliable, flexible, easy to learn, free to use on all operating systems, and supported by both a strong developer community and many free libraries. Python supports all manners of development, including web applications, web services, desktop apps, scripting, and scientific computing, and is used by many universities, scientists, casual developers, and professional developers alike. You can learn more about the language on python.org and Python for Beginners.
Visual Studio is a powerful Python IDE on Windows. Visual Studio provides open-source support for the Python language through the Python Development and Data Science workloads (Visual Studio 2017 and later) and the free Python Tools for Visual Studio extension (Visual Studio 2015 and earlier).
Model Builder is a Visual Studio extension, so you stay working in the development environment you already know. The code and models that Model Builder produces are all versioned with your existing source control solution and built, tested, and deployed. Use the Visual Studio debugger to quickly find and fix bugs across languages. The Visual Studio for Mac debugger lets you step inside your code by setting Breakpoints, Step Over statements, Step Into and Out of functions, and inspect the current state of the code.
Python is not presently supported in Visual Studio for Mac, but is available on Mac and Linux through Visual Studio Code (see questions and answers).
To get started:
Note
Visual Studio supports Python version 2.7, as well as version 3.5 through 3.7. While it is possible to use Visual Studio to edit code written in other versions of Python, those versions are not officially supported and features such as IntelliSense and debugging might not work. Python version 3.8 support is still under development, specific details about support can be seen in this tracking issue on GitHub.
Support for multiple interpreters
Visual Studio's Python Environments window (shown below in a wide, expanded view) gives you a single place to manage all of your global Python environments, conda environments, and virtual environments. Visual Studio automatically detects installations of Python in standard locations, and allows you to configure custom installations. With each environment, you can easily manage packages, open an interactive window for that environment, and access environment folders.
Use the Open interactive window command to run Python interactively within the context of Visual Studio. Use the Open in PowerShell command to open a separate command window in the folder of the selected environment. From that command window you can run any python script.
For more information:
Rich editing, IntelliSense, and code comprehension
Visual Studio provides a first-class Python editor, including syntax coloring, auto-complete across all your code and libraries, code formatting, signature help, refactoring, linting, and type hints. Visual Studio also provides unique features like class view, Go to Definition, Find All References, and code snippets. Direct integration with the Interactive window helps you quickly develop Python code that's already saved in a file.
For more information:
![]() Interactive window
For every Python environment known to Visual Studio, you can easily open the same interactive (REPL) environment for a Python interpreter directly within Visual Studio, rather than using a separate command prompt. You can easily switch between environments as well. (To open a separate command prompt, select your desired environment in the Python Environments window, then select the Open in PowerShell command as explained earlier under Support for multiple interpreters.)
Visual Studio also provides tight integration between the Python code editor and the Interactive window. The Ctrl+Enter keyboard shortcut conveniently sends the current line of code (or code block) in the editor to the Interactive window, then moves to the next line (or block). Ctrl+Enter lets you easily step through code without having to run the debugger. You can also send selected code to the Interactive window with the same keystroke, and easily paste code from the Interactive window into the editor. Together, these capabilities allow you to work out details for a segment of code in the Interactive window and easily save the results in a file in the editor.
Visual Studio also supports IPython/Jupyter in the REPL, including inline plots, .NET, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
For more information:
Project system, and project and item templates
Note
Visual Studio 2019 supports opening a folder containing Python code and running that code without creating Visual Studio project and solution files. For more information, see Quickstart: Open and run Python code in a folder. There are, however, benefits to using a project file, as explained in this section.
Visual Studio helps you manage the complexity of a project as it grows over time. A Visual Studio project is much more than a folder structure: it includes an understanding of how different files are used and how they relate to each other. Visual Studio helps you distinguish app code, test code, web pages, JavaScript, build scripts, and so on, which then enable file-appropriate features. A Visual Studio solution, moreover, helps you manage multiple related projects, such as a Python project and a C++ extension project.
Project and item templates automate the process of setting up different types of projects and files, saving you valuable time and relieving you from managing intricate and error-prone details. Visual Studio provides templates for web, Azure, data science, console, and other types of projects, along with templates for files like Python classes, unit tests, Azure web configuration, HTML, and even Django apps.
For more information:
Full-featured debugging
One of Visual Studio's strengths is its powerful debugger. For Python in particular, Visual Studio includes Python/C++ mixed-mode debugging, remote debugging on Linux, debugging within the Interactive window, and debugging Python unit tests.
In Visual Studio 2019, you can run and debug code without having a Visual Studio project file. See Quickstart: Open and run Python code in a folder for an example.
For more information:
Profiling tools with comprehensive reporting
Profiling explores how time is being spent within your application. Visual Studio supports profiling with CPython-based interpreters and includes the ability to compare performance between different profiling runs.
For more information:
Unit testing tools
Discover, run, and manage tests in Visual Studio Test Explorer, and easily debug unit tests.
For more information:
Azure SDK for Python
The Azure libraries for Python simplify consuming Azure services from Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux apps. You can use them to create and manage Azure resources, as well as to connect to Azure services.
For more information, see Azure SDK for Python and Azure libraries for Python.
Questions and answers
Q. Is Python support available with Visual Studio for Mac?
A. Not at this time, but you can up vote the request on Developer Community. The Visual Studio for Mac documentation identifies the current types of development that it does support. In the meantime, Visual Studio Code on Windows, Mac, and Linux works well with Python through available extensions.
Q. What can I use to build UI with Python?
A. The main offering in this area is the Qt Project, with bindings for Python known as PySide (the official binding) (also see PySide downloads) and PyQt. At present, Python support in Visual Studio does not include any specific tools for UI development.
Q. Can a Python project produce a stand-alone executable?
A. Python is generally an interpreted language, with which code is run on demand in a suitable Python-capable environment such as Visual Studio and web servers. Visual Studio itself does not at present provide the means to create a stand-alone executable, which essentially means a program with an embedded Python interpreter. However, the Python community supplied different means to create executables as described on StackOverflow. CPython also supports being embedded within a native application, as described on the blog post, Using CPython's embeddable zip file.
Feature support
Python features can be installed in the following editions of Visual Studio as described in the installation guide:
Visual Studio 2015 and earlier are available at visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/older-downloads/.
Important
Features are fully supported and maintained for only the latest version of Visual Studio. Features are available in older versions but are not actively maintained.
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APPLIES TO: SDK v4 SDK v3
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Free
This quickstart walks you through building a bot by using the C# template, and then testing it with the Bot Framework Emulator.
Creating a bot with Azure Bot Service and creating a bot locally are independent, parallel ways to create a bot.
Prerequisites
Create a bot
Install BotBuilderVSIX.vsix template that you downloaded in the prerequisites section.
Visual Studio Mac Free
In Visual Studio, create a new bot project using the Echo Bot (Bot Framework v4) template. Enter bot framework v4 in the search box to show only bot templates.
Tip
If using Visual Studio 2017, make sure that the project build type is
.Net Core 2.1 or later. Also if needed, update the Microsoft.Bot.Builder NuGet packages.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Professional
Thanks to the template, your project contains all the code that's necessary to create the bot in this quickstart. You won't actually need to write any additional code.
Start your bot in Visual Studio
When you click the run button, Visual Studio will build the application, deploy it to localhost, and launch the web browser to display the application's
default.htm page. At this point, your bot is running locally.
Start the emulator and connect your bot
Next, start the emulator and then connect to your bot in the emulator:
Interact with your bot
Send a message to your bot, and the bot will respond back with a message.
Note
If you see that the message cannot be sent, you might need to restart your machine as ngrok didn't get the needed privileges on your system yet (only needs to be done one time).
Additional resourcesAdd Microsoft Bot In Visual Studio Mac 2017 Full
See tunneling (ngrok) for how to connect to a bot hosted remotely.
Add Microsoft Bot In Visual Studio Mac 2017 FreeNext stepsComments are closed.
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