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What is the advantage go R tools for Visual Studio when you already have Rstudio installed on your machine. Even if I am using Visual Studio and lets say in that I am working on some C# project, that will be a completely different environment than that of RTVS IDE. So in what scenario RTVS will be useul?

Mike Wise
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Artiga
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1 Answers1

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As mentioned in the RTVS release page, R-Studio is a mature product with an awesome set of features, and RTVS has a fair way to go still in order to catch up.

Over time things will change as new versions of RTVS come out, however currently:

  • One place where RTVS is notably better is the variable explorer, which allows you to browse and drill-down into your variables interactively, as opposed to R-Studio's version that has no drill-down ability at this point.
  • Display of variable values in tooltips while debugging is also very nice, a feature R-Studio lacks.
  • RTVS has some very nice Excel exporting capabilities in the new version.
  • Visual Studio allows the windows to be detached, which makes using multiple monitors during development more useful. I love this.
  • RTVS has some pretty impressive intellisense and code-snippets.
  • The new package explorer is pretty impressive. Some newer features:
  • The way RTVS handles multiple plots is impressive, it has a plot window history and you can even drag and drop plots between devices.
  • It has a workspaces concept makes it very easy to change between multiple R installations, both locally and remotely. This is an important Enterprise feature as you will undoubtably develop and deploy on different environments.

Both R-Studio and RTVS are open source, so the community can add features to them both if so desired.

Over time I expect RTVS to excel at integration with Microsoft's every expanding set of R offerings (the Revolution R engine is being integrated into SQL and other places for example) that are particularly interesting for production deployment.

RTVS should also be able to leverage Visual Studio's advanced debugging and code factoring features, however R-Studio can be expected to respond to those advances as well.

In general I think this will bring some welcome competition and variation into the R development world. Note that R has far fewer development GUI options currently than something like Python does for example.

Mike Wise
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  • drilling down feature for functions/methods is there in RStudio too. – Artiga May 12 '16 at 08:48
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    Not in the same way. You can't just click on a variable and go deep into it and thus explore its structure. – Mike Wise May 12 '16 at 12:29
  • You mentioned you perhaps would end editing this answer. I'm curious about what you think has changed/improved, if anything, in VS's RTools in these months. – catastrophic-failure Mar 03 '17 at 16:29
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    Yes, it has a powerful new capability to handle remote sessions. This same feature also makes it easy to switch between different installed versions of R. I need to write that up, will do it later today. – Mike Wise Mar 03 '17 at 16:32
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    @MikeWise - I've recently picked up R for a specific (important) purpose, but am primarily a Visual Studio guy - at this point, would I be missing anything major by just sticking inside RTVS (would also make it easier for our dev team)? How would I know what the "tipping point" is to make the switch to RStudio? – Coruscate5 Jun 02 '17 at 20:16
  • Shall we chat ? – Mike Wise Jun 02 '17 at 20:34
  • It is a complex topic. Can you ping me in LinkedIn? – Mike Wise Jun 02 '17 at 20:35
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    For me the main place where R-Studio is better than RTVS is in its R-Markdown abilities, the way you can run and debug chunks separately. However when I am running pure R-Scripts, or Shiny programs, I prefer RTVS because of the superior debugger and variable explorer. So I actually use both depending on whether I have a more data sciency task (which inevitably leads to lots or R-Markdown) or more a pure programming task or writing Shiny apps. – Mike Wise Jan 24 '18 at 16:16
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    RStudio I promote to programming newbies. I prefer RTVS and the VS IDE (in their day I loved SGI IDE and Borland IDE) and I enjoyed multiple language integration and debugging within VS. I think it unfortunate that many purists, e.g. in the academic ecosystem, exclude RTVS from their awareness, and for IT in general, they stick with stuff often from NSF funded ops. I am eccentric--I do have a Windows 10 phone that I like, and yet I will reluctantly replace it with an android phone because the fake news about lack of apps became real news. I fear R in VS may succumb to that cultural inertia. – subsci Mar 21 '18 at 20:32
  • Agreed. Actually the R-Studio editor got really slow a few updates ago and the last two times I used it on a big project, I really hated it. I imagine they will fix that though. – Mike Wise Mar 21 '18 at 21:03