Microsoft’s Visual Studio added support for the R programming language this week with the unveiling of the open-source R Tools for Visual Studio, now available in public preview.

The release includes an R editor, code autocompletion, debugging, built-in git and GitHub support and an R plotting window and R Markdown/knitr support for exporting reports to Word or HTML format.

This brings Visual Studio in direct competition with the highly popular RStudio IDE for developing R code. RStudio has a significant head start in the hearts and minds of the R community, creating some of the most popular libraries for the language and employing several highly regarded and well-known R developers such as Hadley Wickham.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here