Setting up .NET Interactive Notebooks

As part of the June 2021 GroupBy Conference, I watched Rob Sewell (b|t) present a session called “Notebooks, PowerShell and Excel Automation”. What I ended up learning from this was not the main point of the presentation (although it was some really cool stuff as you would expect from Rob), but more about the tool that he used.

These days, we tend to think Azure Data Studio when we database developers talk about notebooks, specifically SQL Notebooks. But what Rob used for his demos are a new functionality within VS Code called .NET Interactive Notebooks. It was developed in combination with the Azure Data Studio team and it has support for SQL. But the cool thing that intrigued me was that a notebook could support multiple kernels, unlike Azure Data Studio. Knowing how much we love our SQL and PowerShell and this being a feature that many of us want to see in SQL Notebooks, I decided to try and set this up and poke around.

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