It's official! R Tools for Visual Studio, until now only available as a private preview, is now in public preview and available to everyone as a free, open-source download.
RTVS is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio, which adds R language development capabilities to the popular Windows-based IDE. If you don't already have Visual Studio, you can download Visual Studio Community for free. Then, download and install RTVS to add the "R Tools" menu to Visual Studio.
To get started with R in Visual Studio, just create a new project and choose the "R" template. To interact with R directly, you can type commands directly to the R command line while recalling and editing previous commands. Intellisense tab-completion makes it easy to find and type commands, and get quick access to R documentation. R objects you create appear in the Variable Explorer window, and charts appear in the R Plot window. You can create and edit R scripts using a syntax-aware folding editor, and set breakpoints and step into running code with the R code debugger. Once your R script or RMarkdown document is working, you can check it into Git or GitHub. And because you're working within the Visual Studio environment you have access to all of its standard features as well, including the ability to simultaneously edit code in Python, C++, or any other supported language, use any Visual Studio Extension, and have complete control over appearance, window placement, and key bindings (even Vim!).
This preview release is just the beginning: we have plenty of plans to extend RTVS further. Requests from our private preview include support for creating R packages within RTVS, and support for non-Windows platforms. (This release requires the Windows-based Visual Studio, and doesn't support the cross-platform Visual Studio Code IDE.) If you have preferences or suggestions for features we can add, please take the RTVS Survey, or submit an issue (or even a pull request!) to the RTVS Github repository. (RTVS is released under the MIT open-source license.) And if you encounter any issues with the preview release (or just want to send comments), you can provide a "smile" or "frown" via the Feedback menu in the R Tools menu.
If you'd like to check out a tour of RTVS in action, RTVS's product manager John Lam presents this lap around the features.
Get started with R Tools for Visual Studio here, or for more information check out the official blog post by Shahrokh Mortavazi linked below.
Microsoft Machine Learning Blog: R Tools for Visual Studio Announced
It would be helpful to note in the description above that the R Tools for Visual Studio is only applicable for those using 64-bit Windows. I have a corporate install of Windows 7 and they only use the 32-bit version.
Posted by: Paul Courtney | March 11, 2016 at 13:19
I have encountered problems running an RMarkdown document. I cannot preview the RMardown as either HTML or Word document using RTVS. When I try to preview per instructions it gives me the error message: "This operation requires rmarkdown which is not installed or has been removed". I have rmarkdown 0.9.5 installed and everything is running well using RStudio. I am using Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit version. I installed Visual Studio Community and R Tools for Visual Studio last week but I am faced with this problem. Please help me resolve this problem. Thank you!
Posted by: Tongesai Kapondo | March 17, 2016 at 06:15
Looks very nice. Looks remarkably similar to Rstudio. Competition? Appears so. Competition is a good thing. Why would I choose one over the other? Microsoft's business model (and the things that they made me do to protect their revenue stream) has been problematic to me in the past. Things look different under Microsoft's new leadership. Nevertheless Microsoft remains a large corporation and corporations need to protect themselves. It is R, about 10 years ago, that opened my eyes to the virtues of free and open source software over proprietary and pay-for-license software. Discuss!
Posted by: Farrel Buchinsky | March 18, 2016 at 10:13