R Tools for Visual Studio Updated -- Visual Studio Magazine

R Tools for Visual Studio Updated

A newer version of the R programming language extension is available, with a few more new features as well as updated documentation and help.

By Michael Domingo
03/22/2016

The Visual Studio team has an update to an earlier public preview of its R Tools for Visual Studio now available on Github with a few new features as well as updated documentation and help. RTVS is an extension that allows Visual Studio developers to take advantage of the R programming language from within the VS environment. Besides working with Microsoft's R Open and R Server versions, it also works with the generic CRAN R packages.

The RTVS preview already provides developers with a sophisticated interface, with a fully developed Editor displaying tabbed windows, syntax highlighting, and properly formatted R code. There's also an R Interactive Window that allows working with the R console from within VS. IntelliSense is also built into the Editor and R Interactive, simplifying code completion. A full list of features in this update are listed here.

John Lam, a Microsoft program manager on the Visual Studio team, shows RTVS version 0.2 preview at work in a blog post that provides a cook's tour of the R language capabilities of the tool. It's worth reading since he notes that the blog post itself was written in Visual Studio using RMarkdown, which allowed him to embed the R snippets right inside his code.

RTVS will be free when it becomes gold code. RTVS works with the most recent Update 1 editions of Visual Studio 2015, except for the free Express edition.

To get the most recent version from Github, go here.

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