TFS announces Git Support–WooHa

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Today Brian Harry announced in his blog that TFS will support Git based repositories. To those that don’t know what Git is, it is a popular Version Control system within the Open Source Software (OSS) community, that is based on a distributed model of Version Control. Source code lives decentralized and in the developers machines, with a push/pull mechanism used to synchronize the different team member’s local repository. This relies on a central repository, but nevertheless version control itself is not centralized. This is as opposed to traditional version control systems such as (err) erstwhile TFS, Clearcase, PVCS etc., which are based on centralized version control system.

 

While Git support from MS will encompass both on-premises TFS and TFS hosted service, MS has decided to first roll out the Git support on TFS hosted service (aka TFS Azure, aka TFS on the cloud). So you could just use your MS Account and sign up for the service for free (as of now) by going to https://tfs.visualstudio.com.

Once you go there you are greeted with the following:

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Click on the red button, and you will be taken to the Project Creation Wizard where you will be allowed to choose the Team Project template.

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Now you enter the Project Name, choose the template you want and press “Create Project”, and you are handled a project that will then follow the Git way of doing things – Distributed Version Control System (DVCS).

Also note that you get a pretty decent project portal to add various types of Work Items and also do Builds (free for a while).

 

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The surprising and notable things I found are the ability to do Builds and work on Test Plans. For small teams this is really good, and you can use this even if you did not have Visual Studio as your primary vehicle to develop. Of course Visual Studio integration comes as is to be expected, and you are taken to the familiar Visual Studio experience. You will need the “community technology preview” of the Git VSIX on top of a “community technology preview” of VS 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2). Since this is preview release, please be aware of that.

You could also connect by using Team Explorer Everywhere or with pretty much any Git client – existing Git command lines, XCode, Eclipse’s Git support. Enjoy this new capability from the TFS and Visual Studio teams.

 

Pricing and other details are available from here - https://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/pricing/information/