Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

blogs.technet.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#31

Post by smortaz »

TheLogothete wrote: post #27
smortaz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aha, my bad. Yes, for certain scenarios it makes sense to have a drag/drop paradigm, for some a REPL++ like Jupyter, and sometimes an Editor. That's exactly why we decided to integrate Jupyter w Azure ML. This is going the other way around and makes total sense. The ideal as you've noted is figuring out how to integrate the three canvases intelligently so that you don't have to "alt-tab" between disjoint worlds constantly. Meanwhile I've added it to the feature list:

https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS/issues/1237

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#32

Post by smortaz »

hirenj wrote: post #29

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…

Brilliant idea! We do take PR's :)

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#33

Post by signal11 »

kefka wrote: post #26

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…

Technically speaking, Office already runs on a Linux platform -- Android. In fact, if you subscribe to Office 365, they almost* don't care where you run it, they're still being paid.

* = I suspect the reason behind not creating Office for Linux desktop is that: non-Android Linux desktops have too little market share to be worth the engineering effort / risk of cannibalizing Windows desktop sales. Whereas Android has huge market share and people were perfectly comfortably using Android even without Office. So in that narrow case it made sense to go where the users are.

And they can say that on Linux desktops, you can use a very compatible version of Office inside a browser.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#34

Post by BinaryIdiot »

smortaz wrote: post #18
reddygaru wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio will be coming to Linux

There are no such plans. But we have VS Code, which is great lighter weight IDE that's cross platform. Check it out here: https://code.visualstudio.com/ It has great support for js, node, go, .net etc. already. We'll hopefully add Python & R support soon.

I've heard a great number of rumors regarding bringing Visual Studio (full) to Mac OS X and Linux. Many from Microsoft folks. Not saying they have to be true but I should be shocked if it wasn't at least being researched and looked at.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#35

Post by bhandziuk »

vegabook wrote: post #22

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…

I don't think the R Console or RStudio are going away. Feel free to keep using whatever you want. If you normally have VS open and you also use R then this news is great, otherwise, you get to keep going about your merry way.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#36

Post by phillc73 »

vegabook wrote: post #22

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 is best used unfiltered

Actually, no it's not.

One of R's strengths is its ability to manipulate data and then visualise the output. Doing this via the command line is slow and cumbersome. Do you plan to output a chart, save it, then open it with another application?

RStudio excels in not just being an IDE, but also a visual data representation tool. Write the R code, view the chart in the same application (Rstudio), tweak until happy, then save. It's a much smoother iterative process.

I'd be prepared to believe that perhaps a command line champion could manage libraries and develop code direct from the R interpreter, as well as I can using RStudio. However, I can't see how one could possibly produce the same quality data visualisation working directly at the command prompt.

I don't know about Visual Studio, I don't use it, but your criticism of RStudio is wide of the mark.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#37

Post by localhost »

swalsh wrote: post #30

Stupid question, is it possible to take an R script and compile it to a .net CLR dll?

No, and not a stupid question at all :) This isn't an "IronR", rather RTVS simply calls out to whatever R interpreter that you have installed on your machine (and that is configurable if you like switching between different interpreters / versions).

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#38

Post by smortaz »

tyfon wrote: post #24
smortaz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For Azure ML, some people use it fully in the cloud, others do local work in their favorite IDE, usually RStudio, then upload scripts, do their training, opertionalization, etc. on Azure. If you are using standard R, Python (eg scikit-learn) you can do work locally or on AzureML, but if you want to use Azure ML's own algos, then they're available only on the cloud.

There are also some sample experiments + data on Azure ML that you can check out quickly (no log in):

https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/experiments

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#39

Post by vegabook »

phillc73 wrote: post #36
vegabook wrote: post #22

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 is best used unfiltered Actually, no it's not. One of R's strengths is its ability to manipulate data and then visualise the output. Doing this via the command line is slow and cumbersome. Do you plan to output a chart, save it, then open it with another application? RStudio excels in not just being an IDE, but also a visual data representation tool. Write the R code, view the chart in the same application (Rstud…

Oh please. I do that 20x a day without R Studio. Saving a chart is as simple as png(...). You are clearly too mouse-bound. I reject your comment out of hand.

Re: Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio

#40

Post by vegabook »

bhandziuk wrote: post #35
vegabook wrote: post #22

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…

I don't think the R Console or RStudio are going away. Feel free to keep using whatever you want. If you normally have VS open and you also use R then this news is great, otherwise, you get to keep going about your merry way.

Do you geddit that VS binds you to the inferior Windows builds of R? I use R every hour of every day. I started with Windows R with zero bias.....until I was forced to learn Linux against my will just to get the full, stable, all-libraries-work, experience.
Post reply on HN