How to Use a Jupyter Notebook in Visual Studio 2017?

Question

Visual Studio 2017 now supports use of a Jupyter Notebook.

A Lap Around Python in Visual Studio 2017

According to the MSDN blog post:

To work with a notebook, simply download your IPYNB file as a .py file and open it in Visual Studio. You’ll see that markdown cells have been turned into comments and each cell is collapsible and expandable.

When I download a IPYNB file, rename to a .py file, it displays in the VS editor as a JSON file containing markdown. I was expecting to see a markdown file. What am I missing?

Answer 1

@Jonathan answer is correct. The MSDN blog was referring to Jupyter Notebooks menu item File->Download->Python (.py). There's additional considerations in getting a notebook to run and ultimately a issue with quality of experience.

1. To use a notebook in Visual Studio, download using Jupyter as stated above.
2. Specify the Python environment as Anaconda as shown in the blog image. To do so, either set Anaconda as the default environment or create a solution from existing files that specifies Anaconda as the environment.
3. Open a Python interactive window to display notebook execution.
4. Use Ctrl-Enter to step through notebook's statements.

That said, be aware that Visual Studio's notebook-ish experience is not at the level of Jupyter's, for now. Until VS directly integrates notebooks (.IPYNB files), I see little advantage of using VS over the real Jupyter.

1. VS has fewer and semantically different key bindings than Jupyter.
2. Jupyter's formatting (HTML) is far superior to VS (text).
3. There's little support and documentation for notebook-ish in VS.
4. The whole VS notebook-ish experience lacks polish.
5. IMHO, the beauty of Jupyter is the single window experience but VS uses two.

Answer 2

This is what I believe they mean with the download as. You need the Notebook running then click on File-> Download as-> Pythong(.py)

Once you have downloaded your Python file from the notebook you can open it in Visual Studio.

Edited: added the rest of the answer