GIT with VisualStudio

It’s about a week that I’m trying to use Git with Visual Studio. My intention was to replace SVN by Git because it allows for a more complete development workflow.

The idea is that you can make local commits of your changes and when the changes are mature enough they can be pushed on a central Git or SVN repository. This provides more flexibility and shorten the time between two commits. 

I found the experience of working with a local source controller very convenient and I’m  convinced that this model will soon be adopted on all platforms.  Nevertheless my experience with Git was not completely positive and I’m not planning (any more) to abandon SVN/Ankh/Tortoise. I’m sure that Git makes a perfect fit when developing on Linux but my experience on Windows/VisualStudio was mitigated.

These are my list of pro’s and con’s.
Pros:

  • Enables local commits
  • Very lightweight
  • Command line tools are simple and powerful
  • Branching, Merging and Taggging are easy and reliable
  • Good integration with Windows through TortoiseGit
  • Perfect integration with SVN (you can use Git as a client for SVN)

Cons:

  • Lack of integration with VisualStudio. I tried Git Extensions but compared to AnkhSVN this tool is just a buggy toy.
  • No mature hosting providers. GitHub is the primary repository for Git in the cloud, the one I tested. Frankly I found their security mode (SSH key) not user friendly. Also the tracking tools are poor and at least confusing compared to an Assembla.

Because of these relatively important problems I plan to continue using SVN for the moment. Nevertheless when I need a small local source controller (e.g. when giving courses/presentation) Git is definitely the way to go. Also I plan to use Git when I’m disconnected from the SVN repository for more than a day.

 

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