Wednesday, January 30, 2013

TFS also gets Git too! As in real Git repositories today in TFService, next TFServer will have it too...

Brian Harry’s blog - Git init VS

Today at the ALM Summit I made a bunch of announcements.  A couple of them warrant a bit of extra comment

Today, I made 2 announcements involving TFS, VS and Git.

  1. Team Foundation Server will host Git repositories – and more concretely, Team Foundation Service has support for hosting Git repositories starting today.
  2. Visual Studio will have Git support – and concretely, we released a CTP of a VSIX plugin for the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP today.

That’s right, TFS & VS support a full fidelity implementation of Git.  Although this comes as kind of an abrupt announcement, it’s been a long time in the making.  We started talking about having DVCS support for TFS a year or more ago.  I even mentioned at the end of this post over a year ago that DVCS was in our future.  After a few months of investigation (in the middle of working on TFS 2012), we concluded that adding Git support was the right approach.  As I write this, I’m wondering what the reaction among our customers will be but I can say the reaction inside my own team when we first proposed this was quite mixed.  There were certainly plenty of people who wanted to “build a better DVCS system” or integrate DVCS workflows into the existing implementation.  There were others who were concerned about open source and lack of “control” issues.  But, the more we looked at it, the more it looked like the right thing to do.

This post is going to be a bit of a weird post.  I’m going to structure it as a bit of a Q&A to address many of the questions that came up for us and I’m guess some that will come up for readers.  I suspect this post is going to be the beginning of a conversation.  I’m going to be doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Friday if you want to come along and chat about it.

  • Why are we adding DVCS to TFS?
  • Why are we incorporating Git?
  • Does this mean Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) is dead?
  • But isn’t Microsoft against open source?
  • So is there anything special about our solution?
  • When is this shipping?

“This” has many piece so let’s talk about each one in turn:

  • Team Foundation Service – As of today you can host Git repos in TFService projects.  It is “shipping” now and ready for use.  We still have lots more capabilities to add but it’s ready to use for real.
  • Team Foundation Server – Our plan is to include Git support in the next major release of TFS.  No date has yet been announced.
  • Visual Studio 2012 support – We provided a VSIX today.  It is a “community technology preview” of the Git VSIX on top of a “community technology preview” of VS 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2).  We’re very pleased with the performance/stability of it but it is not yet officially “go-live”.  You are welcome to try it out but it is a preview release for evaluation, so be aware that there may be issues.  We’ll be releasing updates about every 3 weeks and you should expect it to converge fairly quickly.  I don’t know at this time when it will “RTM” but I expect it to have a “go-live” designation before too long.
  • Visual Studio V.Next – Our Git plugin will be integrated into all editions of Visual Studio V.Next (including Express) and will appear in the various pre-releases and RTM.
  • Older versions of VS & TFS – At this time, we are not planning to include Git integration in older versions of VS or TFS.

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Double wow. Seems like they are all in for Git?

Related Past Post XRef:
Visual Studio Gets Git (Visual Studio Team Explorer can talk Git)

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