shanecastle/rdotnet-onboarding

A quick start guide for using R.NET

R.NET quick start

This documentation is for R.NET 1.5.11, which was released on 2014-04-24.

This repository contains C# code for new users of R.NET. Note that the github repository of this quick start guide may be transient and lead to more stable documentation on the R.NET site down the track.

Installation

• Clone (and fork if you wish) this repository with your git client. You can also use GitHub's "Download ZIP" in the bottom right hand corner.
• The solution and project files were authored with Visual Studio 2013 Express Desktop edition. You should be able to read them with versions down to VS2010, and monodevelop, but I have not tested.

NuGet packages

The project files use NuGet packages to manage references to R.NET. More detailed instructions are available at the main R.NET documentation page

Direct DLL dependencies

Alternately the .csproj files can have references to pre-compiled .NET binaries RDotNet.dll and RDotNet.NativeLibrary.dll, expected to be in the folder named "Binaries". You can:

• Either copy these to the Binaries folder
• or localize this to your own system, I'd recommend you use a decent text editor, which if decent should have handy capabilities to replace in files. If you are lacking such an editor I recommend Notepad++ for Windows. Of course, you can update the references the manual way via visual studio: your call.

The Csharp project files contain the following references by default:

    <Reference Include="RDotNet">
      <HintPath>..\Binaries\RDotNet.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
    <Reference Include="RDotNet.NativeLibrary">
      <HintPath>..\Binaries\RDotNet.NativeLibrary.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>

So you can do a search and replace on the string "..\Binaries" in all the files "*.csproj" and replace with the path of your choice, e.g.:

    <Reference Include="RDotNet">
      <HintPath>..\..\..\..\bin\R.NET\1.5.5\RDotNet.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
    <Reference Include="RDotNet.NativeLibrary">
      <HintPath>..\..\..\..\bin\R.NET\1.5.5\RDotNet.NativeLibrary.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>

Getting started

This on-boarding guide is a companion to the main R.NET documentation page, which you should refer to as of 2014-04-19. Open the solution OnboardRDotNet.sln with a "recent" version of visual studio or MonoDevelop (Xamarin Studio) You may want to look at and experiment with the projects in the following order:

• HelloWorld
• Sample1 is taken from the R.NET web site, a simple statistical T-test
• Sample2 is mostly for issues diagnosis at this stage
• Optimization: Adapted from my day work; simplified calibration and optimization problem. Shows various ways to call an R function including vectorized function evaluations.
• Tutorial1: To Be Determined