From ADS Jupyter notebook to Polyglot Notebooks

[hajerty]

The package and version I'm asking about:
Version: 1.103.2 (user setup)
Commit: 6f17636121051a53c88d3e605c491d22af2ba755
Date: 2025-08-20T16:45:34.255Z
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631

Question

Hi everyone, I'm moving from ADS to VSCode, I'm finding same difficult to use Polyglot notebooks instead of jupyter notebook. I had a lot of sql jupyter notebook in ADS and I need to migrate it.
First of all, the connection is unconfortable because I need to get package from nuget and create kernel for every notebook. Is there a way to set the kernel and use it as others kernel in polyglot?
Second unconfortable things is the lake of button in left side action bar. I'm habit to have notebook as principal menu in ADS.
Last things: the connection in the notebook, I'm used to use a notebook for different databases and change the connection, now I need to change the connection string. Is there a way to have connection parameters in the head part of the notebook?

Thanks a lot
Regards

[jonsequitur]

First of all, the connection is unconfortable because I need to get package from nuget and create kernel for every notebook. Is there a way to set the kernel and use it as others kernel in polyglot?

When you click the cell kernel chooser in the bottom right of a cell, the menu that pops up has an item at the bottom, Connect to new cell kernel...

When you click that, you'll see a section for Recent kernels which contains connections that you've used before.

Selecting these will insert cells with the relevant commands to reuse the kernel connection.

Last things: the connection in the notebook, I'm used to use a notebook for different databases and change the connection, now I need to change the connection string. Is there a way to have connection parameters in the head part of the notebook?

You can just declare them as variables in your language of choice and then use the variable sharing feature to use them in the #!connect magic. More details here:

https://github.com/dotnet/interactive/blob/main/docs/variable-sharing.md