From the course: Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Installing Visual Studio Code on Windows - Python Tutorial

From the course: Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Installing Visual Studio Code on Windows

“

- To get started, we'll open up the VS Code webpage. Once you're here, you want to choose download for Windows. Once it's downloaded, let's click on the executable in order to launch the installation flow. Now that we've launched the installation flow, let me go ahead and close this browser Window and then we'll walk through the flow. First, we're going to click on next and make sure you accept the agreement. We'll click next again, choose the default location for installation. We'll keep everything the same for the defaults, and when it comes to selecting the additional task, I recommend you choose every option, as this will make it easier for you to work with the exercise files. Let's click next again, and then finally, install. Okay, now it's finished. Let's go ahead and launch Visual Studio Code. Now that the app is launched, we're greeted with the welcome screen. From here, we can create a new file, open a folder, or add a workspace folder. For now, let's take a quick look at some of the features of this IDE. We can do that by coming to the learn pane and choosing interface overview. The key things that you'll want to work with for this course are the file explorer where you can see all of the files listed, searching across files in case you need to find one with a specific name, managing extensions, which we're going to talk about shortly, and then also finding and running all commands. Let's escape it by just clicking on the overlay. The next thing we want to do to get this ready to work with Python is to go to the customize pane and choose tools and languages. This is going to open up the extension pane on the left side, and one of the options is Python. If we click on the Python extension, we're going to get lots of details about how Python works in Visual Studio Code. What's nice about VS Code is that for each extension, you have a detail screen which tells you about the different features that are included. For instance, in the Python extension, we get linting, debugging, code formatting, and much more. But you don't have to worry about all of that for this course. We're only going to use very limited features. So make sure that you install the extension if it's not already available. Remember, Python is an interpreted language, meaning it processes your source code each time its run, line by line. So in order to run Python code and get code suggestions, you must tell VS Code which interpreter to use. Let's do that now. We're going to close down the extension and then we're going to open up the command palette. To do that, we're going to type Control + Shift + P, and then start typing Python, select interpreter, and choose it from the dropdown. It's going to give us the option for Python 3.7.3, which is the one that we had installed previously. So now we can just select it and we're ready to go. That's it, we are ready to start writing and running our code in an IDE.

Contents