BTW RTVS was built by the same group that made PTVS (Python Tools for VS) and NTVS (Node.js Tools for VS). RTVS will also be free & open source of course.
Cheers
Ten years ago I would have never thought I'd say this, but I am really liking Microsoft these days. Great work!
(here's the repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS)
In other words, why would an Rstudio user consider a switch to RTVS?
* Multi-lingual: projects w C#, Python, SQL, etc.
* Multi-line repl: recall/edit/submit chunks of code
* Lots of add-ins: like 6,000 (hopefully a few are useful for R!)
* Upcoming integration w Excel, Azure ML, SQL, etc.
* etc.
If you are already a VS user, checking out RTVS is a no brainer.
But in summary, RStudio is better :). Hopefully we'll have some key differentiation features in upcoming releases.
* Right click on a data frame & "Open in Excel" (to view, chart, massage, etc.) but one way
to something more elaborate like we did for PTVS/Pyvot (two way):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu31s7kXPOg
to
* Using R as a scripting language in Excel, edited/debugged in RTVS (poke the Excel team pls ;))
to
* <your brilliant idea here!>
I imagine the Excel team is well aware of how embarrassingly weak the VBA language and Excel object model "quirkiness" is in the year 2016. I simply can't understand why they continue to let such a key platform languish.
[1] Just absolutely fantastic tooling, every cent of that VS Ultimate license was worth it in engineering hours saved in one project just with the historical debugging function alone. [2] Haha, fat chance. Some of them went to law school just so they could work at the FSF. Either way, you guys are on a roll. Take out the Telemetry in Win10 though, you've almost captured the hearts, minds and market of that dev-demographic, but "Customer Service Profile Reporting" skeeves engineers out.
PTVS is fantastic, I'm glad to see it carried on.