Hello I would like to get some simple advice on building a .NET application that uses R for statistical calculations and displays charts using R graphical packages. Please understand that I am a neophyte programmer and maybe behind the curve on a number of programming issues...
I am most familiar with Visual Basic and my intention is to make a desktop application. I have a lot of time series data (financial market data) and my intention is to place it all in a database and use ADO.Net to retrieve data and then manipulate in R (stats, create data tables, produce charts) and then display in my VB.NET application front end. As an example, I may want my application to be able to display the % return of all global equity markets in the past week, and to show this as a data table that is accompanied by a simple bar chart that is sorted by best performing index first. Before I start writing any code for this I had a handful of questions: 1) Is using Visual Basic the best choice or are there significant advantages of using C# or C++ within .NET? For example, are there performance advantages of using C++ over VB when it comes to processing large amounts of data, and especially if there are lots of loops involved etc? What do people think? 2) In my mind, I was thinking that I could place my data in the database that comes with .NET, use ADO to retrieve the data I required, and then pass this to R to get the desired output. I am wondering though whether it would be better to build lots or routines in R and let them call the data from the directly from the database i.e. I just use VB front end to execute pre-configured routine in R which will automatically use SQL functionality to retrieve the required data? Again, any thoughts on this? 3) I have managed to poke around the internet (R.org, Nabble etc.) and have managed to get together some introductory papers on using R(COM) with .NET. Is there an 'official' guide that I am missing or can anybody point to any useful sources that might help me get started? I appreciate any time anybody can spare to give me some help. Before I get started I want to avoid going down a blind alley and am more than prepared to have to upskill significantly (e.g. gain a better grasp of C++) if that will give enable me to build much better applications in terms of functionality and performance. I just want some advice before I invest in some books and get cracking. Thanks again Alex _______________________________________________ Rcom-l mailing list Rcom-l@mailman.csd.univie.ac.at http://mailman.csd.univie.ac.at/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l More information (including a Wiki) at http://rcom.univie.ac.at