This post was updated on July 27, 2018.
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. As of 2018, it was renamed the Microsoft Machine Learning Server. The rebranding coincided with some changes made at the beginning of the year. This is still available as a free download with detailed installation instructions. 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 modeling, 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: