Microsoft unveils Python Data Science Extension Pack for Visual Studio Code

Microsoft is looking to help users of Visual Studio Code editor use the Python language in the data science realm.

The company has announced the Python Data Science Extension Pack for Visual Studio Code, a new extensions bundle that features four VS Code extensions for working with the Python language, including the Python extension itself and another for the GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer tool. The extension pack is billed as being a one-stop shop to get tools for data science workflows.

Launched September 18 and available in the VS Code section of the Visual Studio Marketplace, the Python Data Science Extension Pack is intended to help developers with processes ranging from preparing data to conducting analysis and visualizing results to building and training machine learning models. Extensions currently include:

Python, providing support for the language such as debugging, formatting, IntelliSense, and code navigation.

GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer for writing code faster and smarter.

Jupyter, for creating and editing Jupyter notebooks.

Data Wrangler, a code-centric tool for visualizing and cleaning tabular data.

Microsoft said that more extensions could be added to the bundle in the future. The Python Data Science Extension Pack can be tried out on GitHub Codespaces, a cloud-hosted development environment. Developers must sign in to their GitHub account. Developers can provide feedback about the extension pack in the issues tab.