Microsoft is developing RTVS for those developers that are used to developing code in the most popular Microsoft IDE, Visual Studio. RTVS comes in two versions: as a free download for Visual Studio 2015 and already included in Visual Studio 2017. You can download RTVS for Visual Studio 2015 from https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/rtvs/. Visual Studio 2017 is covered in the next section of this chapter.

Once you install the RTVS you open the Visual Studio like you would open it for any other project. Of course, since SSDT is not a separate product-it is just another shortcut to the Visual Studio IDE-you can also open SSDT and get the R Tools menu besides other common Visual Studio menus.

With RTVS, you get most of the useful common panes of the RStudio IDE. You get the Source pane, the Console pane- which is called R Interactive in RTVS-and the Plots pane. The following figure shows the RTVS window with the Source, R Interactive, and the Plots pane open, showing the same plots for the variables from the iris demo dataset, shown in the figure RStudio IDE in action earlier in this section:

If you are familiar with the Visual Studio IDE, then you might want to test RTVS.