Microsoft has made available the November 2021 release of its Python Extension for Visual Studio Code, formally marking the end of the road for the Microsoft Python Language Server and delivering a number of minor fixes for user gripes.

Redmond announced back in September that the Microsoft Python Language Server would reach end-of-life as of the November 2021 release of the Python extension. Since then, Microsoft has been encouraging any remaining legacy language server users to switch to a supported language server, such as Pylance or Jedi. Microsoft previously announced back in May that the default language server for Visual Studio Code was changing to Pylance, which is powered by Pyright, Microsoft’s own static type checking tool.

At the time, Microsoft claimed that the move would deliver greater performance and reliability for developers, and provide the best user experience for Python development with Visual Studio Code.

Announcing the latest release on its Python blog, Microsoft said that any remaining users who have not chosen a new language server will automatically be flipped to Pylance as the default language support. However, if at any point developers wish to try a different language server, users can still do that by updating settings.

Aside from this change, the November release brings only a few minor enhancements and fixes for issues that have been requested by users, Microsoft said. Some of these fixes include:

• Support environment variable substitution for python property in the launch.json file (#12289).
• Support @expectedFailure when running unittest tests using pytest (#8427).
• Support unittest sub-tests (#17561).
• Fix for running all tests when using ini (#17546).
• Fix unresponsive extension issues (#11924).

Developers can download the Python extension for Visual Studio Code from the Visual Studio Marketplace.