15 ms·

Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

279 points by brettcannon 11y ago

myth_drannon 11y ago
Looks like a promising alternative to Rstudio on a Windows platform. If only it was available on Linux...
- reddygaru 11y ago
  Visual Studio will be coming to Linux
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    Really?
  - smortaz 11y ago
    There are no such plans. But we have VS Code, which is great lighter weight IDE that's cross platform. Check it out here: https://code.visualstudio.com/ https://code.visualstudio.com/ It has great support for js, node, go, .net etc. already. We'll hopefully add Python & R support soon.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      I've heard a great number of rumors regarding bringing Visual Studio (full) to Mac OS X and Linux. Many from Microsoft folks. Not saying they have to be true but I should be shocked if it wasn't at least being researched and looked at.
      - smortaz 11y ago
        Personally speaking I would love for that to happen. There is room for both an XL IDE and a XS IDE imho.
- smortaz 11y ago
  Team lead here - yep, we'd love to do a VSCode/R version as well. If you want to lend a voice, take our R IDE survery and upvote that question: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1 https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1
stevehiehn 11y ago
Sweet, If this works on the free community edition I'm gonna try it for sure.
- smortaz 11y ago
  It definitely does! In fact with the Community Edition it becomes a perpetually free R IDE. edit: see gnoway's comment below tho.
  - gnoway 11y ago
    * For personal use, or organizationally for academic purposes, classroom learning and open source projects only. Or if your company has <250 PCs or <$1mm in annual revenue, up to 5 people in your organization can use Community. https://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/mt171547 https://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/mt171547
    - smortaz 11y ago
      Correct, CE version has restrictions. It's great for checking out RTVS to decide if you want to upgrade to Pro/Enterprise.
      - r0muald 11y ago
        Which kind of defeats the fact that RVTS is free and open source, but is still fundamentally understandable in terms of Microsoft's strategy in this area.
        smortaz 11y ago
        Yes. Hopefully when/if we doe VSCode/R it'll be fully open source.
        nightski 11y ago
        It doesn't defeat the fact at all. The number of users who can now use it for free is much greater than before (zero).
tyfon 11y ago
I got to test this tomorrow at work, however loading up a huge program instead of a web page where all the stuff is stored on a server is going to require some changes in behavior. And I usually work from Linux, so it will be in a VM. But I'll try :)
- smortaz 11y ago
  Understood. RTVS itself is 3MB's. Hopefully you won't have to install VS more than once or twice a year as it's several Gigs... Speaking of a web page, our team also did "Jupyter notebooks as a Service" on Azure ML. You can fire up a notebook quickly and code away - essentially like tmpnb if you've used it, but your notebook is persisted. we'll be adding more languages soon. Try one of the samples at: (no login), or start w blank notebook in the Azure ML Studio: https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/browse/?categories=[%22Notebook%22] https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/browse/?categories=[%22...
  - tyfon 11y ago
    Thank you, I will. Is it easy to connect these to local data sources or do I have to upload csv's or something similar? Being a bank we store data locally in both PostgreSQL and MS SQL, although we are considering moving some stuff to Azure anyway. Just have to clear it with the legal guys! I guess I can make a quick export of non personified data for testing though.
    - smortaz 11y ago
      For Azure ML, some people use it fully in the cloud, others do local work in their favorite IDE, usually RStudio, then upload scripts, do their training, opertionalization, etc. on Azure. If you are using standard R, Python (eg scikit-learn) you can do work locally or on AzureML, but if you want to use Azure ML's own algos, then they're available only on the cloud. There are also some sample experiments + data on Azure ML that you can check out quickly (no log in): https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/experiments https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/experiments
  - mizzao 11y ago
smortaz 11y ago
Hi folks - Last year we polled HN on whether there'd be interest in R integration in Visual Studio. You said "YES!", so here it is! I'll be around in case you have any questions. BTW RTVS was built by the same group that made PTVS (Python Tools for VS) and NTVS (Node.js Tools for VS). RTVS will also be free & open source of course. Cheers
- vvanders 11y ago
  Wow, new world indeed. PTVS is fantastic, I'm glad to see it carried on.
- jfaucett 11y ago
  " RTVS will also be free & open source of course." Ten years ago I would have never thought I'd say this, but I am really liking Microsoft these days. Great work! (here's the repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS)
- crispyambulance 11y ago
  I welcome RTVS, but as an Rstudio user, I am now curious about what things are _substantially_ different between the two. They're, at least superficially, very similar. In other words, why would an Rstudio user consider a switch to RTVS?
  - smortaz 11y ago
    RStudio is a fantastic IDE. It's been under development for years by some of the smartest ppl in the R community. it's currently decidedly better than RTVS. There are things here & there that RTVS might be better at, but this mvp was mostly about getting the heart-lung "IDE" features out. Some things you get w RTVS (partly courtesy of VS are): * Multi-lingual: projects w C#, Python, SQL, etc. * Multi-line repl: recall/edit/submit chunks of code * Lots of add-ins: like 6,000 (hopefully a few are useful for R!) * Upcoming integration w Excel, Azure ML, SQL, etc. * etc. If you are already a VS user, checking out RTVS is a no brainer. But in summary, RStudio is better :). Hopefully we'll have some key differentiation features in upcoming releases.
melling 11y ago
Does anyone have a short list of the best sites to learn R? I only have two on my list, and one is for advanced users: http://adv-r.had.co.nz http://adv-r.had.co.nz - Advanced R by Hadley Wickham https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/ https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/ I keep my links on Github: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.org https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.o...
- localhost 11y ago
  There is also the R Inferno "If you are using R and you think you’re in hell, this is a map for you": http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/ http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/
- strictnein 11y ago
  If you'd like more of an online classroom setting: https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming (free to audit)
- VLM 11y ago
  http://swirlstats.com/ http://swirlstats.com/
- larrydag 11y ago
  http://tryr.codeschool.com/ http://tryr.codeschool.com/
- hadley 11y ago
  This is my more intro level book: http://r4ds.had.co.nz http://r4ds.had.co.nz (it's still a work in progress, but you might find it helpful)
TheLogothete 11y ago
Bring the VCF from Azure ML to Visual Studio! I said it in the survey too. VCF is very important in some settings. Being able to code R + SQL and have workflow components in the same environment would be a killer feature.
- smortaz 11y ago
  I think you are referring to WCF? Basically being able to create a model, then operationalize it on the cloud for mass usage? If so, the good news is that you can do that with RTVS, thanks to the R SDK. Basically you create models locally, test/debug them, then zap that onto Azure ML's backend. The SDK itself isn't tied to RTVS in any way. You can use it from RStudio, Jupyter/R, vim, ... if you like. R SDK: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AzureML/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AzureML/index.html Regarding your 2nd question - RTVS/SQL integration - yes, that's definitely coming too. For this initial release we just wanted to make sure we got the core IDE functionality right...
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    No, I mean Visual Composition Framework (it's a Gartner name). It is drag and drop components just like Rapid Miner, Alteryx, KNIME or Azure ML. However the tools that perform those things now are standalone and I have to switch between 5 or so different tools to get my job done. Kind of like SQL Server Integration Services but instead of SQL Server, target Azure ML.
    - smortaz 11y ago
      Aha, my bad. Yes, for certain scenarios it makes sense to have a drag/drop paradigm, for some a REPL++ like Jupyter, and sometimes an Editor. That's exactly why we decided to integrate Jupyter w Azure ML. This is going the other way around and makes total sense. The ideal as you've noted is figuring out how to integrate the three canvases intelligently so that you don't have to "alt-tab" between disjoint worlds constantly. Meanwhile I've added it to the feature list: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS/issues/1237 https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS/issues/1237
vegabook 11y ago
Personally never did R studio. Unfiltered command line is always more flexible, and prevents inertial lockin to a specific tool, OS, to a large extent. Now I'm supposed to do R in ultra-bloated Visual Studio?? I learned R precisely to get away from the inefficiency of the (in the past 20 years, functionally unchanged, visual-candy-only) Excel. How am I to be excited about adding this thick, lumpy MS gravy, to my pure R experience? So that when I do R on Linux or remotely I'm screwed? No thanks. Addendum: Clearly the hive mind MS corporate drones are out in force today/tonight. I know everybody is enamoured with MS-Eclipse etc but R is best used unfiltered. Not hijacked into the laughable world of Windows and Visual Studio. I know from bitter experience that the Windows versions of R are terribly unstable by comparison with the Linux builds. I learned the latter precisely for that reason. MS is playing a fantastic marketing game but I was agnostic on platform until R on Windows started showing its catastrophic limitations. It's a second class citizen as soon as you venture beyond the basics. Take it from an ex R-on-Windows guy who uses R 10 hours per day.
- bhandziuk 11y ago
  I don't think the R Console or RStudio are going away. Feel free to keep using whatever you want. If you normally have VS open and you also use R then this news is great, otherwise, you get to keep going about your merry way.
  - vegabook 11y ago
    Do you geddit that VS binds you to the inferior Windows builds of R? I use R every hour of every day. I started with Windows R with zero bias.....until I was forced to learn Linux against my will just to get the full, stable, all-libraries-work, experience.
    - smortaz 11y ago
      Not sure what you mean - RTVS works with CRAN R...
- phillc73 11y ago
  > R is best used unfiltered Actually, no it's not. One of R's strengths is its ability to manipulate data and then visualise the output. Doing this via the command line is slow and cumbersome. Do you plan to output a chart, save it, then open it with another application? RStudio excels in not just being an IDE, but also a visual data representation tool. Write the R code, view the chart in the same application (Rstudio), tweak until happy, then save. It's a much smoother iterative process. I'd be prepared to believe that perhaps a command line champion could manage libraries and develop code direct from the R interpreter, as well as I can using RStudio. However, I can't see how one could possibly produce the same quality data visualisation working directly at the command prompt. I don't know about Visual Studio, I don't use it, but your criticism of RStudio is wide of the mark.
Mikeb85 11y ago
While I'm somewhat ambivalent about Windows-only tools, it's nice to see R getting love from all the big players. The more market share and developers using it, the more the tools and implementation improves, and the better for all of us. Just finished an assignment using R Studio, Knitr and Plotly, so much less pain than Excel+macros or Stata.
- marrone12 11y ago
  I also vastly prefer R to Pandas, where the same functionality for plyr seems awfully verbose and unclear.
  - eruditely 11y ago
    I definitely prefer R to pandas, dyplr and tools were soo much easier to use for subsetting dataframes and dealing with them, initially I thought python might be better because it was supposed to be easier, but boy was I wrong.
    - pbowyer 11y ago
      Thanks for mentioning dyplr. I've been struggling with pandas (can a library be more convoluted?) and will definitely give R a go.
      - eruditely 11y ago
        Yeah out all the assorted packages that go with that, tidyr too. Here's a cheat sheet https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/data-wrangling-cheatsheet.pdf https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/data-wran...
- deskamess 11y ago
  After downloading this and installing I filled out a survey. One of the questions was about seeing this in VS Code. Yes, please. So there is hope.
kefka 11y ago
That's what I never understood about Microsoft. They're a software company. And some of it is absolutely horrible (Sharepoint), and some of it is the best in the business (Visual Studio). There's a significant mindshare in Linux and Open Source. That being said, I don't understand why MS didn't provide Visual Studio, Office, and similar for Linux at a premium. For example, if Office was $499 for Windows, charge $999 for Linux. That way, they get the best of both worlds (use their software, pay them money). And their mindshare is significant as well, and this would increase it. Maybe finally they are coming to their senses, doing just this. It's about time.
- signal11 11y ago
  Technically speaking, Office already runs on a Linux platform -- Android. In fact, if you subscribe to Office 365, they almost* don't care where you run it, they're still being paid. * = I suspect the reason behind not creating Office for Linux desktop is that: non-Android Linux desktops have too little market share to be worth the engineering effort / risk of cannibalizing Windows desktop sales. Whereas Android has huge market share and people were perfectly comfortably using Android even without Office. So in that narrow case it made sense to go where the users are. And they can say that on Linux desktops, you can use a very compatible version of Office inside a browser.
hirenj 11y ago
This definitely looks like something I need to check out. I do a lot of one off analysis for small bioinformatics projects,and I've taken to sharing results in the Microsoft ecosystem via OneNote. I've wrapped knitr into my own library (knoter) which generates the html and figures, and pushes the whole lot up to OneNote in the selected notebook. OneNote works well for this kind of collaborative analysis, where I need to keep track of the whole discussion somewhere. One thing I'm missing from my workflow would be a way to integrate in to an IDE so I just push a button, and it'll commit the code to a gist, and push the output to a OneNote for other people to comment on. I'm wondering if it would be possible to fork this, and tweak the calls to knitr so they use my library instead.
- smortaz 11y ago
  Brilliant idea! We do take PR's :)
swalsh 11y ago
Stupid question, is it possible to take an R script and compile it to a .net CLR dll?
- localhost 11y ago
  No, and not a stupid question at all :) This isn't an "IronR", rather RTVS simply calls out to whatever R interpreter that you have installed on your machine (and that is configurable if you like switching between different interpreters / versions).
_Wintermute 11y ago
Might try this out as I've had nothing but issues with the Windows version of RStudio.
Gratsby 11y ago
Microsoft is trying really hard to get me to like them again. It's starting to work.
namelezz 11y ago
Why not Visual Studio Code?
- smortaz 11y ago
  An excellent question! Please take this survey so our mgmt hears you :) https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1 https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1
cbo8of 11y ago
No love for C11?
markbao 11y ago
This looks stunning. Anyone know how it compares to RStudio? I might virtualize Windows to use this.
eruditely 11y ago
Microsoft is getting better and better, this is the rise of a new company.
PostThisTooFast 11y ago
Fine, but did they fix any of this stuff: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-getting-worse-as.html http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-g...
karazi 11y ago
Any plans for a 32 bit version? We need our 32 bit R studio install to be able to run in parallel with this as we test this and we cannot switch Java versions from 32 to 64 bit which some pkgs we use require. Congrats on the public release.

279 points by brettcannon 11y ago

myth_drannon 11y ago

Looks like a promising alternative to Rstudio on a Windows platform. If only it was available on Linux...

reddygaru 11y ago
Visual Studio will be coming to Linux
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  Really?
- smortaz 11y ago
  There are no such plans. But we have VS Code, which is great lighter weight IDE that's cross platform. Check it out here: https://code.visualstudio.com/ https://code.visualstudio.com/ It has great support for js, node, go, .net etc. already. We'll hopefully add Python & R support soon.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    I've heard a great number of rumors regarding bringing Visual Studio (full) to Mac OS X and Linux. Many from Microsoft folks. Not saying they have to be true but I should be shocked if it wasn't at least being researched and looked at.
    - smortaz 11y ago
      Personally speaking I would love for that to happen. There is room for both an XL IDE and a XS IDE imho.
smortaz 11y ago
Team lead here - yep, we'd love to do a VSCode/R version as well. If you want to lend a voice, take our R IDE survery and upvote that question: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1 https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1

stevehiehn 11y ago

Sweet, If this works on the free community edition I'm gonna try it for sure.

smortaz 11y ago
It definitely does! In fact with the Community Edition it becomes a perpetually free R IDE. edit: see gnoway's comment below tho.
- gnoway 11y ago
  * For personal use, or organizationally for academic purposes, classroom learning and open source projects only. Or if your company has <250 PCs or <$1mm in annual revenue, up to 5 people in your organization can use Community. https://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/mt171547 https://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/mt171547
  - smortaz 11y ago
    Correct, CE version has restrictions. It's great for checking out RTVS to decide if you want to upgrade to Pro/Enterprise.
    - r0muald 11y ago
      Which kind of defeats the fact that RVTS is free and open source, but is still fundamentally understandable in terms of Microsoft's strategy in this area.
      - smortaz 11y ago
        Yes. Hopefully when/if we doe VSCode/R it'll be fully open source.
      - nightski 11y ago
        It doesn't defeat the fact at all. The number of users who can now use it for free is much greater than before (zero).

tyfon 11y ago

I got to test this tomorrow at work, however loading up a huge program instead of a web page where all the stuff is stored on a server is going to require some changes in behavior. And I usually work from Linux, so it will be in a VM. But I'll try :)

smortaz 11y ago
Understood. RTVS itself is 3MB's. Hopefully you won't have to install VS more than once or twice a year as it's several Gigs... Speaking of a web page, our team also did "Jupyter notebooks as a Service" on Azure ML. You can fire up a notebook quickly and code away - essentially like tmpnb if you've used it, but your notebook is persisted. we'll be adding more languages soon. Try one of the samples at: (no login), or start w blank notebook in the Azure ML Studio: https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/browse/?categories=[%22Notebook%22] https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/browse/?categories=[%22...
- tyfon 11y ago
  Thank you, I will. Is it easy to connect these to local data sources or do I have to upload csv's or something similar? Being a bank we store data locally in both PostgreSQL and MS SQL, although we are considering moving some stuff to Azure anyway. Just have to clear it with the legal guys! I guess I can make a quick export of non personified data for testing though.
  - smortaz 11y ago
    For Azure ML, some people use it fully in the cloud, others do local work in their favorite IDE, usually RStudio, then upload scripts, do their training, opertionalization, etc. on Azure. If you are using standard R, Python (eg scikit-learn) you can do work locally or on AzureML, but if you want to use Azure ML's own algos, then they're available only on the cloud. There are also some sample experiments + data on Azure ML that you can check out quickly (no log in): https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/experiments https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/experiments
- mizzao 11y ago

smortaz 11y ago

Hi folks - Last year we polled HN on whether there'd be interest in R integration in Visual Studio. You said "YES!", so here it is! I'll be around in case you have any questions. BTW RTVS was built by the same group that made PTVS (Python Tools for VS) and NTVS (Node.js Tools for VS). RTVS will also be free & open source of course. Cheers

vvanders 11y ago
Wow, new world indeed. PTVS is fantastic, I'm glad to see it carried on.
jfaucett 11y ago
" RTVS will also be free & open source of course." Ten years ago I would have never thought I'd say this, but I am really liking Microsoft these days. Great work! (here's the repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS)
crispyambulance 11y ago
I welcome RTVS, but as an Rstudio user, I am now curious about what things are _substantially_ different between the two. They're, at least superficially, very similar. In other words, why would an Rstudio user consider a switch to RTVS?
- smortaz 11y ago
  RStudio is a fantastic IDE. It's been under development for years by some of the smartest ppl in the R community. it's currently decidedly better than RTVS. There are things here & there that RTVS might be better at, but this mvp was mostly about getting the heart-lung "IDE" features out. Some things you get w RTVS (partly courtesy of VS are): * Multi-lingual: projects w C#, Python, SQL, etc. * Multi-line repl: recall/edit/submit chunks of code * Lots of add-ins: like 6,000 (hopefully a few are useful for R!) * Upcoming integration w Excel, Azure ML, SQL, etc. * etc. If you are already a VS user, checking out RTVS is a no brainer. But in summary, RStudio is better :). Hopefully we'll have some key differentiation features in upcoming releases.

melling 11y ago

Does anyone have a short list of the best sites to learn R? I only have two on my list, and one is for advanced users: http://adv-r.had.co.nz http://adv-r.had.co.nz - Advanced R by Hadley Wickham https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/ https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/ I keep my links on Github: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.org https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.o...

localhost 11y ago
There is also the R Inferno "If you are using R and you think you’re in hell, this is a map for you": http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/ http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/
strictnein 11y ago
If you'd like more of an online classroom setting: https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming (free to audit)
VLM 11y ago
http://swirlstats.com/ http://swirlstats.com/
larrydag 11y ago
http://tryr.codeschool.com/ http://tryr.codeschool.com/
hadley 11y ago
This is my more intro level book: http://r4ds.had.co.nz http://r4ds.had.co.nz (it's still a work in progress, but you might find it helpful)

TheLogothete 11y ago

Bring the VCF from Azure ML to Visual Studio! I said it in the survey too. VCF is very important in some settings. Being able to code R + SQL and have workflow components in the same environment would be a killer feature.

smortaz 11y ago
I think you are referring to WCF? Basically being able to create a model, then operationalize it on the cloud for mass usage? If so, the good news is that you can do that with RTVS, thanks to the R SDK. Basically you create models locally, test/debug them, then zap that onto Azure ML's backend. The SDK itself isn't tied to RTVS in any way. You can use it from RStudio, Jupyter/R, vim, ... if you like. R SDK: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AzureML/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AzureML/index.html Regarding your 2nd question - RTVS/SQL integration - yes, that's definitely coming too. For this initial release we just wanted to make sure we got the core IDE functionality right...
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  No, I mean Visual Composition Framework (it's a Gartner name). It is drag and drop components just like Rapid Miner, Alteryx, KNIME or Azure ML. However the tools that perform those things now are standalone and I have to switch between 5 or so different tools to get my job done. Kind of like SQL Server Integration Services but instead of SQL Server, target Azure ML.
  - smortaz 11y ago
    Aha, my bad. Yes, for certain scenarios it makes sense to have a drag/drop paradigm, for some a REPL++ like Jupyter, and sometimes an Editor. That's exactly why we decided to integrate Jupyter w Azure ML. This is going the other way around and makes total sense. The ideal as you've noted is figuring out how to integrate the three canvases intelligently so that you don't have to "alt-tab" between disjoint worlds constantly. Meanwhile I've added it to the feature list: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS/issues/1237 https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS/issues/1237

vegabook 11y ago

Personally never did R studio. Unfiltered command line is always more flexible, and prevents inertial lockin to a specific tool, OS, to a large extent. Now I'm supposed to do R in ultra-bloated Visual Studio?? I learned R precisely to get away from the inefficiency of the (in the past 20 years, functionally unchanged, visual-candy-only) Excel. How am I to be excited about adding this thick, lumpy MS gravy, to my pure R experience? So that when I do R on Linux or remotely I'm screwed? No thanks. Addendum: Clearly the hive mind MS corporate drones are out in force today/tonight. I know everybody is enamoured with MS-Eclipse etc but R is best used unfiltered. Not hijacked into the laughable world of Windows and Visual Studio. I know from bitter experience that the Windows versions of R are terribly unstable by comparison with the Linux builds. I learned the latter precisely for that reason. MS is playing a fantastic marketing game but I was agnostic on platform until R on Windows started showing its catastrophic limitations. It's a second class citizen as soon as you venture beyond the basics. Take it from an ex R-on-Windows guy who uses R 10 hours per day.

bhandziuk 11y ago
I don't think the R Console or RStudio are going away. Feel free to keep using whatever you want. If you normally have VS open and you also use R then this news is great, otherwise, you get to keep going about your merry way.
- vegabook 11y ago
  Do you geddit that VS binds you to the inferior Windows builds of R? I use R every hour of every day. I started with Windows R with zero bias.....until I was forced to learn Linux against my will just to get the full, stable, all-libraries-work, experience.
  - smortaz 11y ago
    Not sure what you mean - RTVS works with CRAN R...
phillc73 11y ago
> R is best used unfiltered Actually, no it's not. One of R's strengths is its ability to manipulate data and then visualise the output. Doing this via the command line is slow and cumbersome. Do you plan to output a chart, save it, then open it with another application? RStudio excels in not just being an IDE, but also a visual data representation tool. Write the R code, view the chart in the same application (Rstudio), tweak until happy, then save. It's a much smoother iterative process. I'd be prepared to believe that perhaps a command line champion could manage libraries and develop code direct from the R interpreter, as well as I can using RStudio. However, I can't see how one could possibly produce the same quality data visualisation working directly at the command prompt. I don't know about Visual Studio, I don't use it, but your criticism of RStudio is wide of the mark.

Mikeb85 11y ago

While I'm somewhat ambivalent about Windows-only tools, it's nice to see R getting love from all the big players. The more market share and developers using it, the more the tools and implementation improves, and the better for all of us. Just finished an assignment using R Studio, Knitr and Plotly, so much less pain than Excel+macros or Stata.

marrone12 11y ago
I also vastly prefer R to Pandas, where the same functionality for plyr seems awfully verbose and unclear.
- eruditely 11y ago
  I definitely prefer R to pandas, dyplr and tools were soo much easier to use for subsetting dataframes and dealing with them, initially I thought python might be better because it was supposed to be easier, but boy was I wrong.
  - pbowyer 11y ago
    Thanks for mentioning dyplr. I've been struggling with pandas (can a library be more convoluted?) and will definitely give R a go.
    - eruditely 11y ago
      Yeah out all the assorted packages that go with that, tidyr too. Here's a cheat sheet https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/data-wrangling-cheatsheet.pdf https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/data-wran...
deskamess 11y ago
After downloading this and installing I filled out a survey. One of the questions was about seeing this in VS Code. Yes, please. So there is hope.

kefka 11y ago

That's what I never understood about Microsoft. They're a software company. And some of it is absolutely horrible (Sharepoint), and some of it is the best in the business (Visual Studio). There's a significant mindshare in Linux and Open Source. That being said, I don't understand why MS didn't provide Visual Studio, Office, and similar for Linux at a premium. For example, if Office was $499 for Windows, charge $999 for Linux. That way, they get the best of both worlds (use their software, pay them money). And their mindshare is significant as well, and this would increase it. Maybe finally they are coming to their senses, doing just this. It's about time.

signal11 11y ago
Technically speaking, Office already runs on a Linux platform -- Android. In fact, if you subscribe to Office 365, they almost* don't care where you run it, they're still being paid. * = I suspect the reason behind not creating Office for Linux desktop is that: non-Android Linux desktops have too little market share to be worth the engineering effort / risk of cannibalizing Windows desktop sales. Whereas Android has huge market share and people were perfectly comfortably using Android even without Office. So in that narrow case it made sense to go where the users are. And they can say that on Linux desktops, you can use a very compatible version of Office inside a browser.

hirenj 11y ago

This definitely looks like something I need to check out. I do a lot of one off analysis for small bioinformatics projects,and I've taken to sharing results in the Microsoft ecosystem via OneNote. I've wrapped knitr into my own library (knoter) which generates the html and figures, and pushes the whole lot up to OneNote in the selected notebook. OneNote works well for this kind of collaborative analysis, where I need to keep track of the whole discussion somewhere. One thing I'm missing from my workflow would be a way to integrate in to an IDE so I just push a button, and it'll commit the code to a gist, and push the output to a OneNote for other people to comment on. I'm wondering if it would be possible to fork this, and tweak the calls to knitr so they use my library instead.

smortaz 11y ago
Brilliant idea! We do take PR's :)

swalsh 11y ago

Stupid question, is it possible to take an R script and compile it to a .net CLR dll?

localhost 11y ago
No, and not a stupid question at all :) This isn't an "IronR", rather RTVS simply calls out to whatever R interpreter that you have installed on your machine (and that is configurable if you like switching between different interpreters / versions).

_Wintermute 11y ago

Might try this out as I've had nothing but issues with the Windows version of RStudio.

Gratsby 11y ago

Microsoft is trying really hard to get me to like them again. It's starting to work.

namelezz 11y ago

Why not Visual Studio Code?

smortaz 11y ago
An excellent question! Please take this survey so our mgmt hears you :) https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1 https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1

cbo8of 11y ago

No love for C11?

markbao 11y ago

This looks stunning. Anyone know how it compares to RStudio? I might virtualize Windows to use this.

eruditely 11y ago

Microsoft is getting better and better, this is the rise of a new company.

PostThisTooFast 11y ago

Fine, but did they fix any of this stuff: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-getting-worse-as.html http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-g...

karazi 11y ago

Any plans for a 32 bit version? We need our 32 bit R studio install to be able to run in parallel with this as we test this and we cannot switch Java versions from 32 to 64 bit which some pkgs we use require. Congrats on the public release.