Jupyter in Visual Studio Code – June 2021 Release

Jeffrey Mew

June 14th, 20214 0

We are pleased to announce that the June 2021 release of the Jupyter Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. If you are working with Python, we recommend downloading the Python extension from the Marketplace, or installing 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.

This release focused on:

If you’re interested, you can check the full list of improvements in our changelog.

Visual Studio Code takes security seriously and the Workspace Trust feature allows you to determine which project folders and content you trust, and which ones you would like to keep in restricted mode.

When opening a folder in VS Code, you will be asked if you trust the authors and content of the folders.

If you trust a folder, any notebooks and their outputs will be rendered and can run code. If you do not trust a folder with notebooks in them, you will be in restricted mode. If you would like to change restricted mode to trusted, click on the gear at the bottom left and select “Manage Workspace Trust”.

**Note: It is important to understand that notebooks may have harmful code embedded in their outputs and may run without you executing the cells. VS Code will suppress outputs until you have explicitly trusted the notebook. It is important to determine whether you trust notebooks that are downloaded or come from external sources.

For more information and details about Workspace Trust please see Visual Studio Code – Workspace Trust

The Data Viewer now has improved capabilities for filtering string values with added support for the * wildcard character. In the example below, the column being filtered on contains both “male” and “female” entries. Searching for the values “male” will now only return exact matches. To search for all values that end in “male”, simply type “*male” into the filter box. The * wildcard character will match any number of characters and can be used anywhere in the string.

By popular demand, variables in your notebook can now be sorted! Click on the “Name” or “Type” headers in Variable Explorer to sort. The direction of the arrow in the header will indicate which header the variables are being sorted on and whether the sort is in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order.

These long-awaited changes to the Data Viewer and Variable Explorer have been implemented by our very own Microsoft Jupyter Extension Software Engineering Intern, Vandy Liu! Thank you Vandy for your hard work in shipping these great enhancements!

To try out Native Notebooks today, download VS Code Insiders and the Jupyter extension. The Python extension is strongly recommended for working with Python notebooks.

While the highlights above show what will come out-of-the-box for notebooks, you can always go ahead and customize the notebook to your liking! We have added a number of settings to truly make this your perfect notebook. To explore notebook layout settings, click on the “More actions” icon at the end of the toolbar and select “Customize Notebook Layout”.

This will bring you to the settings page with all notebook-related layout settings where you can create the ideal notebook layout that you prefer.

The full list of notebook layout settings are:

We have also added small enhancements and fixed issues requested by users that should improve your experience working with Notebooks in Visual Studio Code. Some notable changes include:

Be sure to download the Python extension and the Jupyter extension for Visual Studio Code now to try out the above improvements. If you run into any problems or have suggestions, please file an issue on the Jupyter VS Code GitHub page.

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