What is the use of RTVS if you have Rstudio already?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.