Microsoft announced the General Availability of R Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2015 (RTVS). Also, the company gave a hint that the users will soon be able to use R Tools for Visual Studio 2017 too.
Shahrokh Mortazavi, Partner Director of Program Management at Microsoft, states,
“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.”
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 conceivable need.
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 the 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
Microsoft gave a roadmap of the future of R Tools by stating,
" 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 ML and analytics related challenge. Very soon (~May), we’ll release RTVS for VS2017 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."