Using Git For Visual Studio Version Control

Git is a distributed version control system. Instead of running "svn checkout (url)" to get the latest version of your repository, with Git you run "git clone (url)", which gives you a complete copy of the entire history of that project. This means that immediately after the clone, there is basically no information about that project that the server you cloned from has that you do not have.

This gives you some immediate advantages. One is that nearly every operation is now done off data on your local disk, meaning that it is both fast and can be done offline. You can do commits, diffs, logs, branches, merges, file annotation and more – entirely offline. Most commands you run in Git take longer to type then they do to execute.

Another advantage of this model is that your workflow does not have a single point of failure. Since every person working on your project has what is essentially a full backup of the project data, losing your collaboration servers is a minor inconvenience at worst.

The final advantage is the workflows that are now available to you. Git does not depend on a centralized server, but does have the ability to synchronize with other Git repositories – to push and pull changes between them. This means that you can add multiple remote repositories to your project, some read-only and some with write access as well, providing a lot of flexibility.

You can continue to use a centralized workflow, with one central server that everyone pushes to and pulls from. However, you can also do more interesting things. For example, you could have a remote repository for each user or sub-team in your group that they have write access to, then a designated maintainer or QA team or integrator can then pull their work together and push it to a "master" repository that is deployed from.

Git for Windows:

http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list

Tortoise Git:   (Git Extensions also offers Windows Explorer integration)

http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/downloads/list

Git Extensions for Visual Studio:

http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/


Git Extensions provides a top menu "Git" item in Visual Studio, allowing you to perform most every operation directly from within Visual Studio while working on a project. You can also work via the context menu items in Windows Explorer. It also has a comprehensive installer that will install "everything you need" if you want to go that route.

In summary here are some of the major "pros" of using Git:

• Upload and download takes less time due to good compression.
• Overall faster command execution (better performance).
• You commit to your local repository first. This means you can commit
            very fast without normal wait times. No need to have Internet connectivity.
• You can do the upload to the server of several commits in one go.
• Git Bash gives you the option to work in a Linux command shell.
• Allows some nice advanced use (mass delete / rename etc).  
• Git GUI has most of the needed git command available easily via key shortcuts.
• GitExtensions has a nice all-in-one installer making it easier to install.

TortoiseGit
• No messing with SVN folders (no .svn folder in each folder).
• All the files of the local repository are in one .git folder
     at the top most level.
• Powerful and easy branching and merging.
• Optimized for large complex merges.
• You can just remove or rename files via explorer (no extra
    rename/delete command needed as git tracks content not files).
• Less hard drive use compared to SVN.