Multiple Anaconda installations after updating Visual Studio

Environments

I have both Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 Preview and Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 (2) installed on my machine running Windows 10. I don’t actually believe I’ve used Preview on Windows 10 (I’ve opened it up, but haven’t worked in it), but I used to use it on Windows 7 before the Data Science workload was available in non-Preview, so I went ahead and installed it. On January 23, I updated my Visual Studios and their Data Science workloads. Today, I was creating a new Python project when I got confused and frustrated about not finding packages that I was installing on my OS.

Turns out I was looking in C:\Program Files\Anaconda2\, when I was supposed to be looking in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda2_64. I only installed Python 2 (and Anaconda2) while updating Visual Studio, because I’m just now starting work on a project that uses Python 2-only packages. However, now I’ve got:

PS C:\Program Files> ls .\Anaconda[23]\


    Directory: C:\Program Files


Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
d-----        1/23/2018   7:52 PM                Anaconda2
d-----        9/26/2017   4:52 PM                Anaconda3

PS C:\Program Files> ls C:\Python*\


    Directory: C:\


Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
da----        1/23/2018   8:12 PM                Python27amd64

PS C:\Program Files> ls '..\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\*\'


    Directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared


Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
d-----        1/23/2018   8:48 PM                Anaconda2_64
d-----        1/23/2018   8:40 PM                Anaconda3_64
d-----        1/23/2018   8:09 PM                Common
da----        1/24/2018  12:15 PM                Python36_64

Moreover, the Python versions are (almost) all different:

PS C:\Program Files> .\Anaconda2\python.exe --version
Python 2.7.13 :: Anaconda 4.4.0 (64-bit)
PS C:\Program Files> .\Anaconda3\python.exe --version
Python 3.6.1 :: Anaconda 4.4.0 (64-bit)
PS C:\Program Files> & '..\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda2_64\python.exe' --version
Python 2.7.13 :: Anaconda, Inc.
PS C:\Program Files> & '..\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64\python.exe' --version
Python 3.6.2 :: Anaconda, Inc.
PS C:\Program Files> & 'C:\Python27amd64\python.exe' --version
Python 2.7.14
PS C:\Program Files> & '..\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Python36_64\python.exe' --version
Python 3.6.3

Finally, I could have sworn my previous Python 3 installation was at C:\Program Files\Python3, but that seems to have disappeared entirely.

Questions

1. What are the Visual Studio-expected locations for each of these environments? I understand that I can add environments in Visual Studio, but, say, what’s the default on clean install? C:\Anaconda2\, C:\Anaconda3\, C:\Python3, etc. made sense to me, but I can understand them all being in the same Shared folder now. It’s just the C:\Python27amd64 that’s throwing me off.

2. Can I reconcile my new Anaconda3_64 environment with the old C:\Anaconda3\ one? I would have expected Anaconda to update, not to get a whole new installation, but maybe it couldn’t find it a la #2530? That being said, I have code that I’m still working on that uses extra libraries installed in the C:\Anaconda3\ environment and a virtual environment created from there, so I’d rather the two Anaconda 3s get rolled into one.

Thank you in advance!

[huguesv]

I can’t explain the upgrade behavior but here’s the expected install folders on a clean install of 15.5 or 15.6.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda2_64
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Python36_64
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Python36_86
C:\Python27
C:\Python27amd64

[zooba]

At this point, we can’t fix anything related to this any more. The next version of VS won’t include Anaconda in the installer as full installs, and the problem described here is not popping up frequently enough to push out a fix in the upcoming updates. So I’m closing this.