When Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics in early 2015, the tech community watched to see what this would mean for the open-source R language—a mathematical and statistical language used in predictive analytics. Microsoft has promised to keep the Revolution Analytics version of R free and open-source.
In January 2016, Microsoft announced they would be renaming
Revolution R to Microsoft R Server. This is still available as a free download. Microsoft
intends to build R and Revolution Analytics products into their “broader
database, big data and business intelligence offerings and to bring these
benefits to customers and students” as per their Machine
Learning Blog post. Microsoft also stated that a new offering—Microsoft R
Server Developer Edition—will have a free version as well as a commercial
version coming out soon.
Out of all this exciting
news, we’d like to focus on Microsoft’s reveal of new R Tools for Visual
Studio. This free product from Microsoft turns Visual Studio into a powerful R
development environment. R is a software environment that is an alternative to
SAS and SPSS for statistical analysis and modelling, and it is excellent for
building predictive models and offers support for a vast number of such models.
So what do these new R tools for Visual Studio mean to
Syncfusion customers?
Syncfusion offers the ability to take predictive models
trained using R and run them inside a .NET environment with no dependency on
the R environment. This feat is enabled by Syncfusion
Essential Predictive Analytics. This video walks through a
regression sample from model training using R inside Visual Studio to
deployment inside a C# application using Syncfusion Essential Predictive
Analytics library. The Syncfusion library opens up new avenues for developers
who want to take advantage of predictive models and new R tools.
If you are interested in learning more about R and how you
can work with it in your Visual Studio environment, here are some links for you
to check out:
- R Tools for Visual Studio.
- R Succinctly, a free e-book on R published by Syncfusion.
- Essential Predictive Analytics.