This is short into to using Git in Visual Studio 2015 and Team Foundation Server 2015 it is aimed at someone completely new to Git, like me:)
The most important concept to understand about Git is the fact that it is distributed and works on branches. You will be downloading the code from the remote/origin repository to a local repository on your dev environment. Changes you make to the code will first be committed to this local repository. When you are ready to send your changes up to the remote/origin repository you will first pull down changes made by other users on the remote/origin repository and merge them into your local branch to fix merge conflicts and then you will commit the changes to the remote/origin repository.
Git support is now baked into Visual Studio when you install it remember to select Custom installation and select Git tools as part of your installation.
Once installed open Team Explorer, in my case I didn’t have any other TFS connections setup. Click on Manage Connections -> Connect to Team Project and add a new TFS server connection.
Once created, select the server from the list of connections to connect to it. You can ignore the message to configure a workspace, GIT does not use one. Click on the drop down arrow and select Projects and My Teams -> New Team Project… to add a new team project.
Give your project a meaning full name in this case ‘Trying Out GIT’ and select the process template of your choice.
Remember to choose Git as your version control system. After a few seconds you will get a success confirmation. You will see the new team project in your list of projects in Team Explorer, double click on it to connect to the project.
Even though the remote repository is empty you still have to clone it your local repository to start working, you will see a message to clone the repository to start working on it, click on Clone and choose a folder for your local repository.
GIT will download a copy of the empty remote repository to your dev environment. When you make changes and commit them it will first be into this local repository. You will see later how the committed changes are sent to the remote repository on the server.
Since this an empty repository I’m going to add some code to it, click on the New.. button under Solutions to add a new solution to this repository. For this demo I am adding a new ASP.NET MVC application but the type of project is irrelevant. In the team explorer click on Changes and you will see the changes from the solution you created, note the branch is master since you just created it from scratch.
Click on Commit and you will see a successful commit message, each commit gets a SHA-1 hash to uniquely identify it and its changes. This commit was in your local repository, you still have to push it to the server. If you opened TFS web portal and went to the code windows you will see no code in the repository. Click on Sync and you will see the synchronization screen.
There is quite a bit to explain here:
Sync: Send your local changes to the server and pull down changes from the server and merge them into your local repository.
Fetch: Pull down changes from the server but do not merge them into your local repository, you have to merge them yourself.
Pull: Pull down changes from the server and merge them into your local repository, do not send local changes to the server.
Push: Commit your changes to the server, you may get merge conflicts.
You can see the local outgoing commit waiting to be pushed to the server, press Push to commit the changes to the server. In this case we can safely push since this is the initial commit into master. Normally your changes would be made in a branch and you would submit a pull request to pull your changes into the master branch. The pull request will be reviewed by the person in charge of the master branch and then accepted or declined. I’ll show pull requests and code reviews in my next post.
When push is done select Branches from the team menu to see your master branch on the server.
Another term you will come across is origin, it means the remote server where the master is. In Visual Studio it will show as remote/origin in other Git tools it will usually just show origin.
