First Python Project in Visual Studio 2017

Introduction

Python is becoming a popular programming language and everyone wants to get started with Python. But we have seen, most of the developers are confused about where they can start from and how to create their first python application. So, this article will demonstrate to you, how you can create your first Python application in Visual Studio 2017 and after creating your first python project, we will see some of the small python examples so that you can get a better picture of how to start writing your program and how to run it.

Background

If you don't have a Python environment ready and you are willing to work with Visual Studio, don't worry. You can follow my previous article, "Setup and Test Python Environment in Visual Studio 2017". So, let's start and create our first Python project. Visual Studio is the best IDE for .NET Programming language but now it also provides supports for Python. So, we can create a python project and write the code in Visual Studio. While writing the Python code in Visual Studio, we can use all Visual Studio features like debugging, intellisense, etc. We have a different template available for creating the Python project in Visual Studio like you can create a simple project or you can create a single file where you can write your Python code and run it. If you are interested in creating a web application using Python in Visual Studio, then we have Django and Flask template, which provide a full flash of the ready-made template. Here, we will try to create a simple python project.

Implementation

First, open your Visual Studio 2017 or later version and click to the File menu and choose New and then Project. It will open "New Project" window from where we can choose different kinds of application templates. But let's choose Python from installed section [Left Panel] and from the middle panel, select "Python Application" and provide the suitable name and location for this application as showing in the following image and click OK.

It will take a few seconds to get the project ready as follows. The following image shows the basic structure for Python application, we can extend it as per our requirements. Here, you will find "Python Environments" where our application will run. Apart from this, it has a single "FirstPythonDemo.py" file.

The project is ready with one python file and we are ready to write our first program. So, let's write the first program in python as follows and run it. Here, we are going to print something like a message.

print('This is my first python program')

Now, let's run the program in Visual Studio 2017 as generally we do to run the program using F5 and you will get the output as follows:

Great, we are able to run our first python project in Visual Studio. We don't think you will get an issue if you follow everything step by step and your python environment has been setup correctly. Let's extend the above program and add some more code to understand the python.

# Example 1
print('This is my first python program')


# Example 2
x =5
y =4
z=x+y
print('The sum of {} and {} is {}'.format(x,y,z))


# Example 3
def sayHello():
    print('Hello Programmer')

sayHello()

Here above, we have three basic examples in python as we have already discussed for the first one. It is only printing the text. In the second example, we are declaring two variables as x and y and adding both in the third variable as z and print the output. In the third example, we are creating one method as "sayHello()" and calling it. Let's run the program and see the output.

The above output is as expected. The first one is printing the text, the second one is giving the sum of 5 and 4 as an output and the third one is a method which again prints some text.

Let's understand something more about python project properties. Sometimes, it is required to work with some other python version, it could be a higher version or lower version. This can be changed from project properties windows. Right click on the project and go to properties, here in the general section, you will find the Interpreter with some of the installed python versions as shown in the following image. You can change it if you want. From the General tab, we can also change the Startup File and make some other python file as startup file.

Conclusion

So, today, we have learned how to create our first Python project in Visual Studio 2017 and run the first program and extended it.

I hope this post will help you. Please put your feedback using comments which will help me to improve myself for the next post. If you have any doubts or queries, please ask in the comments section and if you like this post, please share it with your friends. Thanks!