TFS to Git

When I started to code when I was but a wee lad, it was mostly HTML, CSS, JavaScript and some Java. Everytime I created some major change to my project I had to version it, it turned into an array of folders “myProject some-date-here” or something like “myProject before feature xxxxx”. This worked for some time while I was the sole developer of the small projects, there was no other person to screw up the code. I was the only person to blame in the projects development and its success.

Stumbling

During university, PHP and C#, we collaborated on projects and it became more apparent that this was not a viable solution. The project sizes grew and more people got engaged. It was getting hard to making sure everyone had to do a specific part and no-one were to touch certain areas of the code.

First steps

I must say that I was late to the party when it comes to versioning my code, but oooh boy am I happy I finally got to do it. It felt as such a relief when I could work together with my collegues on large projects without the fear of overwriting or deleting their changes. I’ve actually done just that in projects with TFS, but that’s because I wasn’t careful and it was no prroblem fixing it since it was in the checkin history. This was when I just started to work.

I took the chance to get an account at visualstudio.com, to get free TFS. Really awesome product, and I’ve been using it for private projects for a good while now. Here you could invite people to collaborate on your projects.

I’ve been working with TFS for about 4 years now and I really like the solution, both in projects at work and for private projects. It’s a great tool that integrates very nicely into Visual Studio.

GitHub to the rescue?

Github, the magical fancy place where I’ve been looking at code and finding inspiration in being a better programmer. It hit me, GitHub is not only a way to share information and collaborate with a lot of people, it’s also a tool to show off what you’re doing and how engage you’re in the community. TFS feels connected to the enterprise business and because of that, sharing code is not really something you want to do.

I started to write some projects that I felt I could share with the world, some api wrappers written in C#. In the beginning I used Visual Studio to push things to GitHub, which worked but I’m not sure I really knew what I did.

Crawling.. again

I began to work together with a friend in an open source project that was written in node.js and hosted on a beaglebone. The time for Visual Studio is over, hello git command line… ugh .. so .. hard.. but who doesn’t love a challenge?

Crawling, and making all the mistakes in the book. I’m sure my friend is going to get grey hair from me, but I’m improving and I’m really happy with what I find! It’s a lot of fun to get a bit lower than just using the gui in TFS.

The end of TFS?

No, I’ll still use TFS in projects at my work. I’m very happy that I get to look at some alternatives, see what else there is and open my mind to the things outside the Microsoft ecosystem. There seems to be a lot of land to discover!

What can I say, building stuff together and share that code is great! Keep sharing and keep coding.