R Tools for Visual Studio .Net In Public Preview

Microsoft has just released it’s R language plugin for Visual Studio .Net 2015 and it’s no joke: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/rtvs-vs.aspx

For those .Net developers and researchers out there, there’s another outstanding R language integrated development environment (IDE): Visual Studio .Net 2015. R tools for Visual Studio .Net (RTVS) is a plugin, project template, and extension to Visual Studio .Net 2015 Update 1 which allows developers to write R Scripts, test, debug, prototype, and research data.

It has all the same features of RStudio, and RGui with the exception of the package manager, but that’s coming soon. You can check out it’s features in this video here:

If you try it out and have some other ideas you can be one of the first to suggest new features at RTVS github repo.

In addition to RVTS, Microsoft is continuing to make good on its promise to support more open source initiatives, the R language being just another one of them. Not only has Microsoft  created this plugin, it has also added the ability to run R Scripts in an asynchronous, multithreaded, multicore concurrent engine: the Microsoft R server and the Microsoft R Open engine.

R Server and R Open are both server and client updates respectively to CRAN (R Project) which give it the ability to run over multiple cores taking advantage of the current CPU and CPU Core processing power. Both of these products are open source (GNU License), which means there source code is freely available to view and along versions for multiple platforms: Mac, Linux, and Windows.

So head over to this link to download the bits and start writing R Scripts inside Visual Studio .Net 2015.