[R] R functionality from within C# .NET

[tofesi at web.de]

Dear all (especially R-Win users),

I'm looking for a good way to use R functionality from within a C# application. One way would be via (D)COM, but I would prefer a more "direct" solution: My main concern is to ship all necessary files in one easy-to-install package, so that users do not need to download and install R separately. Any help, advice, or example code would be greatly appreciated (I am using Visual C#).

I could not find anything related to this issue in the R-Win FAQ, and also not on R-help.
There are expensive commercial numerical/statistical libraries for use in .NET (e.g. http://www.extremeoptimization.com/, http://www.centerspace.net). Alas, as expected, they provide _much_ less functionality than R. So I wonder whether any other people have been successful in using R in their .NET projects, or if anybody has ideas how to best make it work (I'd be open to invest some time, possibly also with other interested folks).

Thanks for the good work,
  Tobias