'Another Dark Day': Users Slam Microsoft Over Polyglot Notebooks Deprecation

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Visual Studio Code extension faces March shutdown with no transition guidance:

Microsoft has abruptly announced the deprecation of Polyglot Notebooks with less than two months' notice, throwing the future of the .NET Interactive project into doubt.

The deprecation will come into effect on March 27, whereupon bug fixes and support will cease, and no new features will be added. However, the extension won't be automatically uninstalled from a user's Visual Studio Code installation.

Polyglot Notebooks is an important element of the Microsoft .NET Interactive project, which Microsoft describes as "an engine and API for running and editing code interactively." .NET Interactive can run as a kernel for notebooks and "enables a polyglot (multi-language) notebook experience," according to Microsoft. "For the best experience when working with multi-language notebooks, we recommend installing the Polyglot Notebooks extension for Visual Studio Code."

That recommendation presumably remains in place until Microsoft pulls the plug.

The deprecation announcement was made in the project's GitHub repository and the thread was locked, limiting conversation. However, users were quick to raise additional issues, questioning the reasoning behind the deprecation and the short time frame.

One pointed out the Polyglot Notebooks extension in Visual Studio Code was Microsoft's recommendation for data analysts, since Azure Data Studio is retiring at the end of this month. Microsoft's reaction was to remove the recommendation.

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