Installing and configuring R tools for Visual Studio in Windows

R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) is another development environment for R like RStudio, but it has extended facilities developed by Microsoft. RTVS is an extension of Visual Studio 2015, and it's free with the Community Edition of Visual Studio 2015. In this recipe, you will go through the installation process.

Getting ready

To install RTVS, your computer needs to fulfill some of the following prerequisites:

• Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition (this is freely available)
• Visual Studio Update 3 to install RTVS
• Microsoft R Open/Open source base R 64-bit with 3.2.1 or higher
• Microsoft R Client

How to do it…

Let's take a look at the following steps:

1. Download and install Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and install Update 3 or install Visual Studio Community 2017.
2. Install Microsoft R Open or CRAN R 64-bit with R version 3.2.1 or higher.

3. Download and install R Client from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-r/r-client-get-started:

4. Once you have completed the prerequisites, download and install RTVS from https://aka.ms/rtvs-current:

How it works…

Once the installation is completed, the user interface is similar to RStudio. Here is the screenshot of RTVS:

See also

Here are the relevant links for more information about RTVS. It is suggested that you take a look at them for updated information:

• https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/rtvs/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/rtvs/installation