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0 pointssmortaz10y ago0 comments

RStudio is a fantastic IDE. It's been under development for years by some of the smartest ppl in the R community. it's currently decidedly better than RTVS. There are things here & there that RTVS might be better at, but this mvp was mostly about getting the heart-lung "IDE" features out. Some things you get w RTVS (partly courtesy of VS are):

* 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.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

mistermann10y ago· 2 in thread

Could you expand a bit on what the nature of integration with Excel might be?

smortazOP10y ago

Sure. It can go from very basic:

* 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

* Using R as a scripting language in Excel, edited/debugged in RTVS (poke the Excel team pls ;))

* <your brilliant idea here!>

mistermann10y ago

> Using R as a scripting language in Excel, edited/debugged in RTVS (poke the Excel team pls ;))

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.

ReedJessen10y ago

Love the honesty and detailed answers. Looking forward to see the future of the product.

iheartmemcache10y ago

Tangent, but Hanselman, you, Meijers, et al are slowly but effectively changing the perception of Microsoft amongst my "live by the iPhone die by the MacBook" friends. Candor like this, good tooling[1] and community involvement/outreach. Y'all are already significantly more open than the Apple ecosystem - stick with it and my die-hard GPL fanboy friends might be the next converts[2] ;).

[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.

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