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Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

blogs.technet.microsoft.com

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Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#21

Post by smortaz »

TheLogothete wrote: post #16

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.

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

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...

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#22

Post by vegabook »

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.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#23

Post by larrydag »

melling wrote: post #11

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 - Advanced R by Hadley Wickham https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/ I keep my links on Github: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.o...

http://tryr.codeschool.com/

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#24

Post by tyfon »

smortaz wrote: post #17
tyfon wrote: post #7

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 :)

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…

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.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#25

Post by Mikeb85 »

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.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#26

Post by kefka »

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.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#27

Post by TheLogothete »

smortaz wrote: post #21
TheLogothete wrote: post #16

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.

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://c…

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.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#28

Post by marrone12 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #25

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.

I also vastly prefer R to Pandas, where the same functionality for plyr seems awfully verbose and unclear.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#29

Post by hirenj »

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.

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