Pandas wheel building

Pandas is a great library for data analysis but working with it on windows with a set version of numpy can be problematic. We deploy packages internally as wheels, and our code relies on a later version of numpy.

So what's the solution, build a wheel with the version of numpy that we use, this can be done if you have the python compiler for windows.

We use Python 2.7 for which you can find the installer here

virtualenv pandas
cd pandas\scripts
activate
cd ../..
pip install numpy==1.9.3+mkl --no-index --find-links=z:\PythonWheels
cd Source
python setup.py build_ext --inplace --force
python setup.py bdist_wheel

Voila, one wheel built with numpy==1.9.3+mkl, this can then be installed by pip on various environments.