Announcing R Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2015

by Shahrokh Mortazavi, Partner PM, Visual Studio Cloud Platform Tools at Microsoft

I’m delighted to announce the general availability of R Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2015 (RTVS). This release will be shortly followed by R Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2017 in early May.

RTVS is a free and open source plug-in that turns Visual Studio into a powerful and productive R development environment. Check out this video for a quick tour of its core features:

Core IDE Features

RTVS builds on Visual Studio, which means you get numerous features for free: from using multiple languages to word-class Editing and Debugging to over 7,000 extensions for every need:

• A polyglot IDE – VS supports R, Python, C++, C#, Node.js, SQL, etc. projects simultaneously.
• Editor – complete editing experience for R scripts and functions, including detachable/tabbed windows, syntax highlighting, and much more.
• IntelliSense – (aka auto-completion) available in both the editor and the Interactive R window.
• R Interactive Window – work with the R console directly from within Visual Studio.
• History window – view, search, select previous commands and send to the Interactive window.
• Variable Explorer – drill into your R data structures and examine their values.
• Plotting – see all of your R plots in a Visual Studio tool window.
• Debugging – breakpoints, stepping, watch windows, call stacks and more.
• R Markdown – R Markdown/knitr support with export to Word and HTML.
• Git – source code control via Git and GitHub.
• Extensions – over 7,000 Extensions covering a wide spectrum from Data to Languages to Productivity.
• Help – use ? and ?? to view R documentation within Visual Studio.

It’s Enterprise-Grade

RTVS includes various features that address the needs of individual as well as Data Science teams, for example:

SQL Server 2016

RTVS integrates with SQL Server 2016 R Services and SQL Server Tools for Visual Studio 2015. These separate downloads enhance RTVS with support for syntax coloring and Intellisense, interactive queries, and deployment of stored procedures directly from Visual Studio.

Microsoft R Client

Use the stock CRAN R interpreter, or the enhanced Microsoft R Client and its ScaleR functions that support multi-core and cluster computing for practicing data science at scale.

Visual Studio Team Services

Integrated support for git, continuous integration, agile tools, release management, testing, reporting, bug and work-item tracking through Visual Studio Team Services. Use our hosted service or host it yourself privately.

Remoting

Whether it’s data governance, security, or running large jobs on a powerful server, RTVS workspaces enable setting up your own R server or connecting to one in the cloud.

The road ahead

We’re very excited to officially bring another language to the Visual Studio family!  Along with Python Tools for Visual Studio, you have the two main languages for tackling most any analytics and ML related challenge.  In the near future (~May), we’ll release RTVS for Visual Studio 2017 as well. We’ll also resurrect the “Data Science workload” in VS2017 which gives you R, Python, F# and all their respective package distros in one convenient install. Beyond that, we’re looking forward to hearing from you on what features we should focus on next! R package development? Mixed R+C debugging? Model deployment? VS Code/R for cross-platform development? Let us know at the RTVS Github repository!

Thank you!

Bits: http://microsoft.github.io/RTVS-docs/installation
Code: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS
Docs: http://microsoft.github.io/RTVS-docs

Comments

[David Rinck]

I had a question regarding Rcpp and integration Visual Studio C++ with R. Dirk Eddelbuettel in his Rcpp 2016 FAQ states that R simply does not compile with Visual Studio. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rcpp/Rcpp-FAQ.pdf

Is this still true? Can you use Rcpp and Visual Studio C++ with Microsoft R Open or do you still need to use g++, and on Windows specifically mingw?

[Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT)]

It is still true. Generally R does not compile with VC++ not because of Visual Studio issues but rather because compiling with the same compiler for all platforms ensures runtime and package compatibility and makes code running on Mac, Linux and Windows behave identically.

It is possible to make R compile with VC++ but then you'd get Windows-specific engine bound to Microsoft C Runtime library. But packages on CRAN are compiled with gcc. Different compilers use different C runtime libraries and loading packages built with one compiler into environment compiled with causes problems.