

Django with Visual Studio - juice13
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/python/tutorials/django-with-visual-studio/

======
dagw
What's so perverse about that? Everybody I know who's tried it claims that VS
with PTVS (<http://pytools.codeplex.com/>) is an excellent python dev
environment.

edit: original title was editorialized to to claim that doing this was a
perversion

~~~
pekk
Are you going to deploy Django on Windows? You would not be wise to do so. So
why choose such a profoundly different development environment?

~~~
jmduke
Kind of taking some liberties with the definition of the world 'profoundly',
aren't you?

If someone works quicker and better in a given dev environment, power to 'em.

~~~
obviouslygreen
I don't think "profoundly different" is an overstatement when comparing
Windows to anything Linuxy.

If someone works quite a bit better in Windows, OK... but I think it's a far
better idea to mirror your deployment environment as closely as possible, not
just in staging/testing, but on your development machine as well.

That's not always practical, but working in an environment you should _know_
doesn't even vaguely approximate any deployment scenario means you _will_ miss
any platform-specific issue that would have been obvious if you were staying
closer to your deployment platform. At best it will be found during
testing/staging or by another dev who's using a more appropriate environment,
but that's several extra steps and extra time that wouldn't have otherwise
been necessary.

~~~
Herbert2
I'd want to add that working in a windows for dev, linux for deploy
environment will eventually make you constrain yourself to using libraries
which work on both platforms.

~~~
dguaraglia
Which, unfortunately, is a big gap in Python. We had this developer using
Windows who wouldn't want to install Visual Studio. So we tried finding
binaries for stuff like LXML, and the newest versions we could find where a
good two or three years old. Eventually we hit a wall with one of the packages
(I can't recall exactly which one, but one related to cryptography I think.)
We couldn't find a binary, and installing Visual Studio + configuring to work
from the command line, etc. took way more time than setting up VirtualBox with
an Ubuntu machine.

A massive waste of time.

~~~
dagw
I agree that the whole situation with C based python packages on Windows is
really quite broken, but until they get around to actually fixing the
situation every python programmer who has to touch windows should have
<http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/> bookmarked.

------
mullr
The true perversion is that all the screen shots have the Solution Explorer
docked to the righthand side of the window. It's hard to describe how
fundamentally wrong that feels.

~~~
camus
meh , VS devs get used to that , like the horrible theme colors in the latest
VS. I said good for microsoft if they offer developers choice. And it means
opensource is kinda winning. But i'm waiting for the day Windows is POSIX to
go back to that os , windows is too crappy for Open-source devs even with ming
installed...

~~~
ktavera
Visual Studio color schemes <http://studiostyl.es/>

------
bdesimone
I think Visual Studio is the best IDE there, but I'm not sure I'd be more
productive switching from a _nix based environment just for the IDE. Would
anyone whose gone from_ nix to windows for python web development be able to
comment on the experience and tradeoffs?

~~~
edwinnathaniel
IntelliJ is the best IDE :).

Eclipse Python support is lacking.

NetBeans seems to come along pretty well, I just hope that they have more
support.

~~~
president
Does the community edition support Python?

~~~
RossM
According to this matrix[1], no. I use PHP, Python and Ruby on a day-to-day
basis and really need an IDE that can support all of these. Eclipse is flaking
out on me now as well.

Anyone know if IDEA really the best multi-language Eclipse alternative, or is
there something better?

[1]:
[http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m...](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html)

~~~
yareally
I like it well enough for python, php, javascript, css/html and android/java.
Used it once or twice for ruby, but not enough to know how good it was as I
have never used ruby otherwise. Intellij is also its own code base, not
another fork of eclipse, like most IDEs out there. Intelij also has built in
support for git, hg, github/bitbucket, pretty much any SQL dialect including
SQLite (as well as SQL syntax checking ERD diagramming, and table editing).
Unit testing integration for python, php, javascript, java. Django support
(and for templates), Google App Engine (python and java), jQuery support,
javadoc support, epydoc/restructured support, phpdoc support, jsdoc support,
and some of the popular php frameworks. I could go on, but you can see it
pretty much comes with everything one needs (and what one does not need can be
disabled from plugins). If it does not come with it, open a feature request
and they'll probably add it later.

Other IDEs I have used:

\- Aptana (PHP, html/js, css, python). It's really a fork of eclipse with some
additional features. If you want a free IDE, it's better than eclipse, but not
quite as good as intellij.

\- Visual Studio (2005, 2010, 2012). Great if you are doing C# or F# and
combine it with Jetbrain's Resharper. Not as fond of it for other languages
though. I've heard JS support is also very good now, but my web development is
all scripting languages like Python and PHP so it does not help me much.

\- NuSphere's PHPed. A good natively compiled IDE for PHP and web, but
development kind of lags behind other IDEs and a few bugs that were never
fixed when I used it would constantly annoy me. Also, only Windows unless you
do WINE (it worked well enough on WINE though).

\- Eclipse. Eclipse interface is clunky and honestly, it's slower than
Intellij or any of its derivative cousins. Aptana improves on it though. Used
Eclipse for a couple of years before finding Aptana and then moving onto
Intellij.

It's not just about the IDE though, jetbrains in general is a great company.
Despite English not being their first language for many employees, they have
awesome customer service and are very up front about their road map and
interact with their users directly.

I've used some commercial IDEs in the past, such as NuSphere's PHPed (which
was a decent IDE at the time, not sure how it is now). PHPed's developers did
not speak English as their primary language either, but they did not have
anywhere close to the same level of interaction and support. Jetbrain's bug
tracker is open for anyone to report on and they actually fix stuff you report
(filed a few reports over the past few years, all were eventually fixed).

Maybe I'm just getting overly excited over what any decent company should be
doing in the first place. However, many IDE vendors do not seem to do that
overly well. Having confidence in the developers of your IDE is important (at
least to me) and that they are listening to their customers/users.

------
vyrotek
I'm a .NET dev and I literally just gave this a try last week. I've been
toying with Python on my Ubuntu laptop but I really wanted to see how this
worked on Windows too. Visual Studio is by far my favorite IDE and being able
to write Python in VS was pretty amazing!

------
X-Istence
Why are Visual Studio's menu's yelling at me?

~~~
MichaelGG
VS2012 did a lot of visual changes, many of them controversial. The guise was
to make it "more metro" despite Windows 8 not taking the same approach (like
all caps).

The VS 2012 betas tried putting all caps on various parts of the UI. They got
tons of pushback on that, so they eventually just made it the menu so they
could still claim they kept the principle idea alive. In the final release,
there's an option to turn it off.

A lot of VS devs are happy that they added a proper dark mode, and there's a
plugin to autohide the menus so it's less of an issue that it appears at
first. The biggest usability issue is the single-colour icons.

There's probably amazing internal threads and all sorts of political issues
surrounding the design. In the end, I think the champions of the change count
on wearing you down, making their opponents feel silly for arguing over such
petty things as menu styles.

------
piqufoh
"To complete this tutorial, you need a Windows Azure account"

yeah, right.

~~~
727374
You only need an azure account if you want to deploy your app, the last step.
If you just want to run locally and check out python in VS, you don't need an
account.

------
condiment
I'm curious to know how VS compares to PyCharm in terms of how rapidly the
Python environment is able to restart after a code refresh.

It's been my personal experience that PyCharm's Run/Debug configuration is
fast to restart in Run mode, but considerably slower in Debug mode, taking
5-10 seconds to restart and attach the debugger. So while I'd like to be able
to work with breakpoints and inspection always available, in practice those
tools have been harmful to my productivity.

If VS is better or faster in this regard, it might be worth a try.

~~~
dav-id
In my personal experience with working in .NET MVC within VS 2012 it is
noticeably slower working with Debug always on as you cannot simply build and
refresh the code, each time you need to load the debugger, test drop out of
debug, fix, repeat.

I prefer to do as much without debugger and then when I need to inspect
variables and step through code drop into debug mode.

With Python this may be different but I doubt it. I expect you will have to
wait while the debugger loads up. If you can edit code whilst debugger is
running then I can see that being a big plus and a reason to keep it on.

------
raverbashing
Running a Hello World is easy

Maybe they got it to be easier in Azure, still, here's a couple of things they
didn't show how to do and is usually a pain:

\- serving static resources (easier with newer Django versions, still)

\- serving in a subaddress (like serving it from mycloud.com/myapp)

\- Using MSSQL with it (there are Django adaptors, but last time I tried there
were some issues)

------
juice13
Someone changed the title. Any reason for that apart of some people not
agreeing with my world views?

~~~
nullvoyd
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and
topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or
readership numbers. [..] Some tactics include being deliberately obtuse,
appealing to emotions, being controversial, intentionally omitting facts and
information, being loud, self-centered and acting to obtain attention. Trivial
information and events are sometimes misrepresented and exaggerated as
important or significant, and often includes stories about the actions of
individuals and small groups of people, the content of which is often
insignificant and irrelevant relative to the macro-level day-to-day events
that occur globally.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism>

------
run4yourlives
Just go download Komodo.

I regularly use Komodo Edit (100% Free) and it is pretty good, the IDE is even
better if you want a more involved tool. This is probably my favourite for a
"windows like" experience.

------
kfir
To think that people use an IDE for Python is sad news for me.

~~~
adandy
Real programmers use cat.

~~~
superflit
Real Real programmers use echo

~~~
_ZeD_
real programmers use butterflies

------
tonyblundell
Coming Soon - How to develop Ruby on Rails apps on an Etch-a-sketch

~~~
tonyblundell
I knew this was going to get downvotes, but come on, doesn't this seem to
anyone else just a little bit desperate on Microsoft's part?

They're giving out bad advice to sell bad tools. I'm a little disheartened
it's got so much attention on here.

~~~
skeletonjelly
Have you used VS? What's your basis for dismissing it as a "bad tool"?

~~~
tonyblundell
Yes, I spent a year using VS full-time for .NET development, and I think it's
a ridiculously contrived way of developing Django applications.

Hence the promotional 'articles' like this from Microsoft.

~~~
pc86
My goodness, a whole year.

People bitch and moan about Microsoft being closed off from the rest of the
development community, then when they offer the rest of the development
community a way to use VS to write in their language of choice, they get this
crap.

A lot of what Microsoft does is shit, but the constant and pointless anti-MS
circle jerking is ridiculous.

~~~
tonyblundell
Grow up. I'm not bitching and moaning, nor am I anti-MS. I told you I worked
with MS languages.

I just think this is a crap way of doing Django. Just like developing
Silverlight apps in VIM would be.

