The new Visual Studio 2017 has built-in support for programming in R and Python. For older versions of Visual Studio, support for these languages has been available via the RTVS and PTVS add-ins, but the new Data Science Workloads in Visual Studio 2017 make them available without a separate add-in. Just choose the "Data Science and analytical applications" option during installation to install everything you need, including Microsoft R Client and the Anaconda Python distribution.
If you're new to the Python capabilities in Visual Studio, this Lap Around Python in VS2017 will provide an overview of the capabilities. The capabilities of RTVS 1.0 — described in detail in this announcement for Visual Studio 2015 — are now available in Visual Studio 2017, as shown in the presentation below by John Lam.
These capabilities are now available in all editions, including Visual Studio Community 2017 which you can download for free here. For more on the new data science workloads, check out the blog post by Shahrokh Mortazavi linked below.
Visual Studio Blog: Build Intelligent Apps Faster with Visual Studio and the Data Science Workload
It is said that you need VS 2017 ver 15.2 to see the `R language support` and `Runtime for R...` which was released on the May 10th. I am having 15.2 but I don't see those options in the VS installer.
Posted by: Marcin Kosińśki | May 17, 2017 at 03:10
Hi Marcin
Which OS it is? there is unfortunate setting in 15.2 that limits RTVS to Windows 8 or later. So it won't appear in Windows 7.
Also, is it VS stock install from visualstudio.com or did you ever install earlier previews?
Posted by: Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT) | May 17, 2017 at 07:55