R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and generating graphics that is widely used in the scientific community. As a part of Microsoft’s growing embrace of open source, the company has released a first look at R Tools for Visual Studio. R has a relatively high learning curve, and one of the goals of this release is to make getting started with the language much easier. One of the ways it does this is with the R aware editor that provides useful and syntactically-correct completions. In addition, Visual Studio also provides tools to plot data on graphs, a variable explorer, debugging environment, and a history window that makes it easy to search through past computations.
