Visual Studio now speaks the R language!

Visual Studio now speaks another language: R!

R is decidedly the most popular statistical/data analysis language in use today. R Tools for Visual Studio brings together the power of R and Visual Studio in a convenient and easy to use plug-in that’s free and Open Source. When combined with Visual Studio Community Edition, you get a multi-lingual IDE that is perpetually free (for small teams).

Here are the exciting features of this preview release:

• 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 6,000 Extensions covering a wide spectrum from Data to Languages to Productivity.
• Help – use ? and ?? to view R documentation within Visual Studio.
• A polyglot IDE – VS supports R, Python, C++, C#, Node.js, SQL, etc. projects simultaneously.

Other features requested by the R developer community, including a Package Manager GUI, Visual Studio Code (cross-plat), etc. will be part of a future update.

Check out Shahrokh Mortazavi's post on the Machine Learning blog for more information...