title: Getting VS2015 to work with arcpy
body: <p>I am taking a course on programming ESRI's ArcGIS using Python.  Although the course content shows us how to work with various IDE's, I would like to do my homework in Visual Studio 2015 (Community Edition).  But I am having trouble getting it to work on my laptop and would like some advice.</p>
  
  <p>I have successfully installed ArcGIS.  I have successfully run some Python scripts which include the use of the arcpy module.  One IDE that recognizes arcpy, pycharm, shows me path information about the environment. For example, PyCharm's External Libraries window shows C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3 .</p>
  
  <p>In Visual Studio, when I open a .py file known to run under the other interpreters, the IDE marks import arcpy as an unknown package.  So in Visual Studio I am attempting to set up a new Python Enviornment, "ArcGIS-enabled", to get it to recognize that package.  So far I have not been successful.  Here I what I have tried so far:</p>
  
  <p>I set </p>
  
  <pre><code>Prefix Path = C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\
  Interpreter Path = C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\python.exe
  Windowed Interpreter = C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\pythonw.exe
  Library Path = C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\lib
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Can someone please help me figure this out?</p>