Git – Source control in Visual Studio 2010

gitversion controlvisual studio 2010visual studio 2012visual-sourcesafe

After doing some search on SO, Google and MSDN forums I've become frustrated that there is so little information for what might seem like an obvious question and possibly a dumb question.

I need to use source control in Visual Studio 2010 Professional. I do not have separate Team Foundation Server 2010. Some people have mentioned SourceSafe? I haven't seen any SourceSafe inside of the Visual Studio 2010 to be honest.

What are some alternatives (preferably free) for source control in Visual Studio 2010? Or is it already integrated in Visual Studio 2010 that I am so blind to have missed that?

Update #1: Thank you everyone, I will go with SVN, in particular AnkhSVN for Visual Studio 2010.

Update 3/23/2011: It's been almost a year since I have asked this question. I highly recommend using either Mercurial or Git over Subversion. So for those of you who are looking for Visual Studio 2010 version control system, look no further than Git or Mercurial extensions from the Visual Studio Extension Library.

Update 5/16/2013: I would now strongly encourage you to use Git over Mercurial, TFS or SVN. Take a look at CodeSchool's Try GitHub in the browser to see how awesome it is!

Getting Started with Git on Visual Studio 2012 – in-depth tutorial by Andy Lewis.
Visual Studio Tools for Git – An extension for Team Explorer to provide source control integration for Git. Enables integration with local Git repositories and provides tools to work with remote repositories.

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Best Answer

See: List of Source Control Systems with Visual Studio Plugins

Visual Studio is just an IDE. You can use any source control solution that you want with it. Any open source source control solution in particular, like git, mercurial (hg) or subversion (svn). And there are commercial products like Perforce or SourceGear Vault. See here for a pretty exhaustive list and google for more information.

You can find Visual Studio plugins that integrate it with any source control. Of open source ones subversion is especially rich in this regard. Commercial ones usually come with this integration.

And if you are not using source control that requires you to explicitly check-out files to edit them (like VSS or TFS do), the IDE integration is not even essential. I personally prefer to use git or subversion from outside the IDE.

And please, stay as far from Visual SourceSafe as you can.

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Should I add the Visual Studio .suo and .user files to source control

Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

How do you create a new project/repository?

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