Do great statistics using R Tools for Visual Studio 2015

Microsoft's strategy is to bind all its assets and stay in a continuous state of integration, be it SQL Server; Office or its Communication set of products such as Exchange, Live or Skype.

With the addition of R technology for SQL Server in its most recent, highly touted product SQL Server 2016, integration of R with SQL Server and by default with Visual Studio 2015 was a natural extension. Probably integrating R with Excel is not far behind.

As it moves forward embracing Open Source concepts, Microsoft R client is free, the details of which follow:
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Microsoft R Client (x64) - (English)
SHA1: B5A7053C7CBC1079091DD1420D04E0489F43AD00
File name: en_microsoft_r_client_x64_8839107.exe
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You can download R Client from here:
http://aka.ms/rclient/download

With Microsoft R Client you are not limited to Microsoft R Open and you can use any open source R package. ScaleR is a powerful new technology in Microsoft Client. ScaleR's propriety functions can be used to great advantage for parallelization and remote computing. With R Client you can work locally using ScaleR but is somewhat constrained limited by local memory and speed. This is improved by pushing the compute context to Microsoft R Server(SQL Server R Services) and R Server for Hadoop.

Here are the highlights of R Tools to start off with. You get all these and much more

• R aware Editor with IntelliSense
• R Interactive Window with multi-line editing
• Debugger with Locals and Stack views
• Plots and Shiny apps
• Variable Explorer, data frame viewer
• Support for CRAN R, Microsoft R Open, Microsoft R Server
• Free and Open Source

Microsoft R Client is also part of the R Tools for Visual Studio which gets installed with Visual Studio Update 3 install.

Here are some screen shots from a Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 upgrade from Update 2. You can also install the latest version of Visual Studio 2015 Community.

As a default, you get notified of product updates right within Visual Studio 2015 Community (presently Update 2).

 In the Extensions and Updates window you see more details and you can launch the installation from here by clicking the Update button.

This is an intermediate window during updating. R Tools 0.3 for Visual Studio 2015 are being applied to Visual Studio.

 

This is the Help screen of Visual Studio 2015 after update. I am not sure why the window is stall showing Update 2!! However, notice that R Tools have been added.

R Tools appear to provide a comprehensive set programming support for using R with Visual Studio 2015.

A R Tools toolbar item is added to the menu as shown.

Looks like there are two independent ways of getting Microsoft R Client, the hyperlink which downloads the executable to your computer to being installing or upgrading Visual Studio 2015.

Please note before upgrading to Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 I might have started the independent client installation. I will have to check on that.

Here is an image from R Tools site.

Get the Windows 10 Anniversary Update if you are in the Microsoft Camp

Windows 10 Anniversary Update SDK build 14393 has been released. It has tons of improvements and enhancments (it appears about 2700) to the Universal Windows Platform.  This SDK allows you to take advantage of the enhancments. The APIs are easier to use and have a more natural approach for vision, speech, and writing.

These are the highlights of the improvements in this SDK:

Windows Ink:
To new controls InkCanvas and InkToolbar helps to incorporate pen easily with minimum code

Cortana APIs:
Cortana can be used in your apps. It is not just voive control but also actions that depend on voice.

Windows Hello:
Biometric identification using Windows Hello in Edge to authenticate users.

Desktop Bridge:
Modernize existing WIn32/.NET apps

Native BASH running on Windows

Xamarin as cross-platform tool

More details on SDK here.

Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 has the latest Windows 10 SDK
Get the update from the above link.
If you have an earlier version of Visual Studio 2015 you may install it right from the Visual Studio IDE as shown.

IFTTT and the IoT - 2

IFTTT and the IoT - 2

In my previous post I wrote about IFTTT as it is a cool interface whiich you can use without too much of a sweat or equivalently without any coding.

IFTTT stands for the conditional statement "If this then that'. It is a web based service with a simple workflow. Flow of work (action, that) is created by a trigger based on a condition(this), like say,'If it rains take the umbrella'. This service was provided in some cases, such as the various financial services that you could get an email if your chosen stock price reached a new high, etc. They were called alerts and they are also used by banks and credit card companies.


As most of our actions and those of the 'Internet of Things' are condition-based, IFTTT is expected to grow and expand deep into IOT.


What IFTTT has done to simplify this process is by offering a web interface to set up triggers and take appropriate actions. Both the trigger and the actions that follow the trigger have their own channel and every IFTTT recipe is tied into these channels.

Since my first post on this (http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/06/ifttt-and-iot.html), I wrote a few more posts to elaborate and since it is already a year or more ago after my first post, I revisited and was quite thrilled that lot more has been added to the list of things you can do.

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/07/hey-ifttt-now-has-office-365-channels.html

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/06/azure-logic-apps-and-ifttt-azure-app.html

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/10/one-easy-way-to-get-started-with.html

In my recent visit to IFTTT site, I see a lot more IoT and Skype related recipes.

Here is a piece from Connected Homes

IoT/IFTTT_2016_00

Amazon's Alexa is Number 1 TopChef when it comes to creating IFTTT recipes and here are few from Amazon.

IoT/IFTTT_2016_01

Microsoft's Office Integration with IFTTT was described in an earlier post. Here are few of the many recipes using Skype.

IoT/IFTTT_2016_02

You are motivated as to its utility, go visit the page. http://ifttt.com

IFTTT or (Microsoft) took notice of my rant in my previous post and added a bunch of OneDrive related recipes.

JavaScript is number 1, but R is catching up

JavaScript is number 1  and then there ar others that follow:

Java
PHP
Python
C#
C++
Ruby
CSS,
C
etc.

R has moved from 17th to 13th Place according to RedMonk's biannual programming language rankings. TypeScript a subset of JavaScript a la Microsoft is another language on rapid move.

On what does RedMonk base this ranking?
Language usage on StackOverflow and GitHub.

More info here:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3096812/application-development/iot-spurs-surprise-surge-in-assembly-language-popularity.html

On Thiobe index JavaScript is not the top, C++ is. My guess is IoT drives the language use in the future and if that is true then C++ will get the greatest grade.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3096812/application-development/iot-spurs-surprise-surge-in-assembly-language-popularity.html

In 2015 JavaScript had just moved from 9 to 7 on the Thiobe Index:
http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-popular-is-javascript.html

Google Translator looks very good

Most of them can do well, some better, some worse. It also depends on what language you want translate from/to. The better ones can auto-detect the language and for some of them you need to specify the source and destination languages.

In my recent experiment, I tried to translate a few lines from a receipt in Czech. Google did definitely better than Bing or Babylon. Babylon cannot auto-detect. Here are the results which is easy for you to rate them.

Bing

Some correct and for some no clue. The online tool should correctly recognize end of line.

Google

Perfect score!

Babylon

OK but does not recognize end of line

When it comes to Hungarian sometimes it is auto-detected as Turkish, a not so serious mistake.