hi there - it took a while to make our 1st hire, but i'm happy to report that work is underway as part of the Azure ML group. as soon the project has a pulse i'll post on HN. current plan is to have it be free & open source like Python Tools for Visual Studio.

i'm also hiring for the project, so if you're into dev tools (editors, debuggers, profilers, languages, ...) and looking, pls drop me a line. looking for devs and a technical PM.

re R.Net - no effort that i know of.