Microsoft Wants Your Feedback On Its New Python IDE

First time accepted submitter phoolishcyrus writes "Dear Slashdot: would you kindly take a look at our little project, PTVS — Python Tools for Visual Studio? It helps you develop Python (using any interpreter, not just IronPython) and comes with a few other goodies. Spare no punches."

Ups and Downs

[robertkeizer]

I find it okay to work in. Coming from VI and the command line some of the features are nice, others not so much. One thing I noticed about the python plugin for VS is that when using PySide, you must run in interactive mode, rather than debug. A nice feature that I found lacking was for VS to automatically generate a list of classes and functions for a library that is imported. Obviously this tool is integrated fairly heavily into python at points as evident in the profiling section ( good work by the way ), so it would be handy to refresh classes/module listings when "import foo" or "from foo import bar" was detected in a save. All in all, not a bad development system.

MSFT guy here. will answer as many Q's

[phoolishcyrus]

as best I can (while running between meetings)! Thanks for all your comments & questions so far.

Background info:

PTVS is basically a 2 person (1 dev, 1 test) effort. Recently we had a summer intern & a new dev has joined since to work on Big Data (think dryad/hadoop/etc) which is great. We've been running "under the radar" so to speak until now. The parts that we're actually most proud of are that we convinced mgmt to let us do this as Open Source, and more importantly under Apache 2.0. The fact we can actually accept code contributions back (may be a 1st?) is huge too. Not a big deal for most, but trust me, as staunch pro OSS guys, it was a big deal & took a lot of work to accomplish...

Thanks in advance & on to answering questions...

PS Just updated the project page w a couple of videos to give you an overview. Excuse the cheesy production, we don't exactly have a marketing dept.

PTVS - Core editing experience : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CoGsSlrxKk [youtube.com]
PTVS - Profiling : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCx7rlPyEzE [youtube.com]

Re:What the shell is this?

[shutdown -p now]

A simple way to explain the difference between VS Express and VS Shell is this:

VS Shell is VS without any language-specific services. Basically you get the core IDE services only - menus, toolbars & tool windows, command system to wire it all up, text editor (with syntax highlighting, but you need a language plugin to drive it), and core build services. This is mainly intended for the use by anyone who's making their own language, and wants to build it on top of an existing IDE - they just take VS Shell, slap their own language service and project system on top, and redistribute the result. One real world example of a commercial product doing this is Delphi Prism. However, the side effect is that Shell can also be used by end users to install extensions on top to get a working product for free.

VS Express (like any other VS version) is, essentially, VS Shell + whatever language the Express edition supports (C#/VB/C++); but with any further extensibility disabled.

In other words, with VS, for free, you can either have plugins (in particular, other third-party languages) without Microsoft's C++/C#/VB tooling, or C++/C#/VB tooling without plugins. If you want both at the same time, you need VS Professional or higher, which is not free.