/team lead/

Your fears regarding Python on Windows were quite justified. However, the world has dramatically changed, thanks in large part to folks like Continuum.io and their Anaconda distribution, Christoph Golke, and many other wheel providers.

Visual Studio actually provides an option to download Anaconda for you. It has a few hundred pre-built Windows pkgs ready to go. We also use it on our free jupyter notebook service and have been very happy with it.

UCI repo: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

Anaconda: https://www.continuum.io/downloads

Azure Notebooks: https://notebooks.azure.com