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Git now fully supported and integrated into Team Foundation Service

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Here is great news for open source developers: Brian Harry announced today at the Microsoft’s ALM Summit that Git is now fully integrated into Visual Studio as well as the Team Foundation Service, Microsoft’s cloud-powered Application Lifecycle Management tool.

Here at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., we are excited to hear such news as this offers more choice and flexibility to development teams. We happen to work on a daily basis with developers on Git in the context of projects such as Node, Dash, Redis or Solr so we totally get the goodness of this news.

The Visual Studio Tools for Git work great against Git repositories locally, in Team Foundation Service, on GitHub, CodePlex, BitBucket etc. That’s all because they are using Git as the distributed source control solution and they talk to Git repositories via the open source library LibGit2. LibGit2 is a portable C library that runs on many different platforms including Linux and Mac.

Microsoft engineers in Brian’s team have been contributing to LibGit2 for a number of months now as they worked with the community to add Git support in Visual Studio – some of them earning committer rights on this popular and very active open source project. Even better as the team started testing the integration, all the bug fixes and security fixes that they found also have been contributed back to the project.

Therefore not only is Brian’s announcement good news for developers in Visual Studio wanting to use Git to contribute to open source projects, it’s also great news for others building on top of the LibGit2 library on any platform.

The Visual Studio Tools for Git are provided as an extension for Visual Studio 2012 but Brian also says that they should be included in the box with all editions of Visual Studio in a future release – including the Express editions.

I can tell you MS Open Tech engineers can’t wait to take full advantage of the Visual Studio Tools for Git in their daily interaction and collaboration with the open source developers’ community.