Hello, I am unfamiliar with visual studios and PTVS. All I can help you with is the environment variables that I set in a command prompt to get the IDL-Python bridge to work on Windows. WHen I installed Anaconda, I did not specify the option to make it the default system Python distribution which meant that I needed to set PYTHONHOME. Here are the variables that I set from a command prompt: set PATH=C:\Anaconda;C:\Program Files\Exelis\IDL85\bin\bin.x86_64;%PATH% set PYTHONPATH=C:\Program Files\Exelis\IDL85\bin\bin.x86_64;C:\Program Files\Exelis\IDL85\lib\bridges set PYTHONHOME=C:\Anaconda That also meant that I needed to launch Python and the IDL Workbench from the same command prompt so that IDL can import the proper environment variables. I have no idea how visual studios does this so you may need to do some research to figure that out.