Microsoft development tools such as Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server now support Git, the open-source version distributed version control system for software projects.

“We’ve fully integrated Git support into Visual Studio,” a Microsoft representative told me. “From Visual Studio and within the Application Lifecycle Management tool, you’ll be able to access Git projects on any Git server.”

Microsoft announced the surprising news today at ALM Summit, the company’s application lifecycle management conference. Git is a wildly popular way to share projects, move code, collaborate with developers locally and globally, and roll back changes that don’t quite work out the way they were intended. Over two million developers use the popular GitHub as a place to work together.

Brian Harry, Microsoft Fellow

Microsoft has not had a similar type of distributed version control system, Microsoft fellow Brian Harry said this morning at a keynote, and Git is winning. So the question that Microsoft asked itself, according to Harry was simple: ”Why don’t we just adopt Git?”

The new integration is already enabled this morning in Team Foundation Server, Microsoft’s own source control software.

One of the things that Microsoft has done over the past few months in preparation for this is contribute to the open source codebase. Today, a representative told me, Microsoft has “a number of full-time engineers actively working on and contributing to the lib2git project.”

Microsoft is not simply copying files over to its one source management services, Harry said, although syncing is available. Rather, the integration is native.

“Our hosting of Git is not Microsoft hosting of Git … it’s Git,” Harry added.

Refresh for more details, this is a developing story.

photo credit: shehan365 via photopin cc

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