Getting VS2015 to work with arcpy

[Paul Schrum]

I have posted this question on stackoverflow, but I think I may be more
likely to get help in the mailing list:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35069640/getting-vs2015-to-work-with-arcpy

Getting VS2015 to work with arcpy
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35069640/getting-vs2015-to-work-with-arcpy>
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.

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 .

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:

I set

Prefix Path = C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\Interpreter Path =
C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\python.exeWindowed Interpreter =
C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\pythonw.exeLibrary Path =
C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.3\lib

Can someone please help me figure this out?