R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS)

RTVS is a Microsoft free version (distributed under a GNU license) of IDE for writing, validating, and running an R code within Visual Studio. RTVS is supported on the Community, Professional, and Enterprise editions of Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.

R Tools (https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/rtvs/) will help developers, analysts, and data scientists to operate and perform statistical computations, visualizations, and data management. R Tools bring graphical interface to R Engine, workspace for rich editing, interactive windows, variable and visuals explorer, help, IntelliSense, and much more. It also binds local and remote workspaces (on-premises or in the cloud), so that data analysts can switch between computational environments very easily.

The view of workspaces in RTVS is made simple and graphical for a user to switch between different R environments:

It resembles the famous and powerful RStudio (www.rstudio.com), but still offers all the necessities that community and time brought into the development of RStudio, Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, or others. Microsoft has also addressed the community with questionnaires to ask what the users of RTVS are still missing. They can contribute and add their wishes at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTVS1.

RTVS was announced and released (as a beta version) in early 2016 but only got version 1 in 2017.