Since around 2005, I, and teams I’ve led, have been using the Tortoise flavor of source control clients.  TortoiseSVN, TortoiseHg, and TortoiseGit.  Each came with the command-line client as well for specific use cases, but most of the time, we used the Windows explorer shell integration.  To this day I’m using TortoiseGit with GitHub, BitBucket, and Team Foundation Service+Git.  It works well with all of them.  I’m not sure why it took so long for me to figure out that Atlassian has a Git and Hg client called SourceTree.  Here is what it looks like, and it seem to work seamlessly with my existing repositories and working copies.  In addition, it integrates diffs very well so that it’s obvious right off the bat what has changed in the file. 

One feature that SourceTree does not provide is explorer shell integration so that I can right-click on the repository working copy and perform functions directly from there.  It will remain to be seen how often I reach for TortoiseGit with the new slick interface that SourceTree has.  I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will take long to see.

Jean-Rene Roy has graciously helped to sponsor a Party with Palermo at DevTeach in Toronto.  If you are not yet signed up for the conference, please head on over to www.devteach.com.

If you have already signed up, make sure to RSVP for Party with Palermo on 5/29 at 6:30PM.  Also on the schedule for that evening is a .Net Rocks show just for the 10th anniversary of the DevTeach conference!

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GIT works great with the new Team Foundation Service (TFSvc?).  I’m an old school Tortoise guy (SVN, Hg, GIT), but I had to laugh at the little branding touch they through in when doing a pull.

Notice the Visual Studio logo in ASCII art.  I’ve actually been using it for some time, but I hadn’t notice that until today.

The good news is that this is just GIT.  Not some Microsoft GIT build, but it’s regular old GIT hosted for me and integrated with the other TFS features like work items, story boards, etc.  All I have to have is Microsoft accounts for my team members, and it all works.  We have three systems hosted here now, both code and work tracking.  One is an HTML5 smart client, one is a C++ system including some MFC as well as driver code, and the third is an ASP.NET Web API system with NServiceBus back end.  In short, it doesn’t matter.  It’s just GIT.

I do like the work item tracking at the story level and at the task level.  And the visualization works well also.

The stories are the rows on the left, and the sticky notes are the tasks that are what needs to be done for this story to be completed.

In short, they did a good job with Team Foundation Service.