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). Today we’re releasing this as a public preview for evaluation and testing by developers.
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 one of our future updates.
Source: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio | Machine Learning Blog