.NET Interactive Notebooks in VS Code

I was browsing and came across the Microsoft Learn TV area with lots of learning tools. I started to explore the Videos for things of interest and initially looked at a JS video then thought about C# training, with a BIM plugin in mind, and saw the following series: Reactor 1.

In the initial part Scott uses a .NET Interactive Notebook to demonstrate the basics of C# in VS Code.

This caught my attention as it’s a Jupyter Notebook but in VS Code. I was interested in the Jupyter Notebooks but they were another program that I need to be using as well as my normal tools, and so I never took exploring them any further at the time. With VS Code, which I use a lot, having a Notebook could be quite handy. Especially when I’m trying to get my head around some of the code.

Problems with Antivirus preventing me installing .NET files

So the C# tutorial was put to the side while I looked at setting up .NET Notebook on my PC’s. This wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. My Anti-Virus software stopped me from installing any .NET programs and just threw them all in the bin and would not let me do a further install.

It took me ages to try and disable part of the BitDefender program to allow me to install the relative components to make the Notebook work. That really got up my back as I searched for how to pause the BitDefender and I couldn’t so tried to shut parts down in Task Manager and was being blocked doing that too. I ended up spending an awful lot of time struggling with my antivirus software.

It is supposed to be a tool to help me, not hinder me, so I was not impressed by its lack of an easy way to allow me to download something onto my PC that I wanted from a reputable site. Microsoft make Windows 10, so if I can’t download some operating files from the same supplier as the OS then I find that pretty weird.

Setting up

After finally installing it on 2 PC’s I’m now in a position to play with it.

But not so fast. It seems to do C#, F# & Powershell, and there is apparently a polyyglot Notebook that will do other programs, Python being one of them, see below:

I was thinking of doing a AHK Notebook stepping through the code as a tutorial for later reference. So not something I can do at the moment, but maybe some other programs will be added to them later.

End comment

After all the effort of getting it up and running I can’t actually do what I want to do with it with AHK at the moment. I’ll go through the C# tutorial, for a bit of practice and learning and also just to see how they lay their teaching out.

Tutorials

I can see this as a handy way for me to go back and check on some of the coding that I’ve been doing, like SQL and JavaScript. Both of those have their own syntax that I get into trouble with on a regular basis, so having a personal primer that I can add to and refer to may be quite handy, with code to execute and markdown to note the issues as well. This could be a great resource.