Microsoft provides full Git support for Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Service

Today Microsoft publicly introduced the first Community Preview version of the Git tools for Visual Studio and the Team Foundation Service at the ALM Summit. Microsoft is fully committed to supporting this open distributed version control platform going forward. This was one of the top requests on Uservoice. It's pretty cool to see how both Microsoft and groups like the ALM Rangers are actively looking at these suggestions and transform them in working features.

A few features are not yet on par with 'standard' Team Foundation Server version control, any current feature that depends on Changesets will not work with Git as version control provider. I expect Microsoft will work on enabling these features going forwards. Most visible feature to not be supported in Git for now would be Visual Studio Code Review.

Focusing on the things Git does enable is much more interesting.

• Compared to local workspaces, Git is a lot more powerful.
• The Branching and Merging capabilities, especially of 'baseless' merges are a lot more powerful than in standard Version Control.
• It works with any Git repository out there
• The Team Foundation Service implementation is straight Git and thus you can use Visual Studio with any Git Repository, but  you can also use any development environment that supports Git and connect to the Team Foundation Service.

Git is not yet released as an addon or feature for the on-premise version of Team Foundation Server. Expect it in the next major release.

Congratulations to the team that made this happen. Keep up the good work!

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