GIT support in VS2013

Visual Studio 2013 ships with built in support for GIT source control. This is a welcome addition because it provides a free/open alternative to running the enterprise level TFS platform. Even the smallest of freelancers and students can benefit from using source control but big enterprise solutions are completely out of the question in these cases.

Free GIT hosting providers such as GitHub and BitBucket are extremely popular and you can set up one of these accounts and load your project up in VS2013 in a matter of minutes. Of course you host your own internal GIT server as an alternative to TFS.

Developers who work with TFS are used to having native source control integration, so using the built in GIT support adds a sense of familiarity. You still however need to understand the basic GIT concepts or you will find yourself lost and confused, it's definitely not a direct replacement for TFS Source Control which you could be mistaken to assume, but the Visual Studio implementation is designed to be as familar as possible.

I would say that the options available are a little 'dumbed down' in VS2013 which in my opinion is probably for the better when your in the phase of migrating from using TFS to GIT. Git can be quite overwhelming at first so having a more bare basics set of tools to start will help keep it simple. The Git Tools which ship with VS2013 also include Git Bash which is the raw command line interface for Git and a GUI version. I have found myself resorting to using the command line tool every now and then when I've fallen into a situation where Visual Studio is preventing me from performing a task or the option is unavailable. I stress that this is still a rare occurance.

I am trying to resist swapping to using a 3rd party GIT tool, so far I have managed to do everything I need with the inbuilt GIT support. Overall I think the GIT support is adequate, however my opinion may change on this in the future as I become a more advanced GIT user. There is nothing stopping me installing a 3rd party tool any time I need one because after all that is what makes GIT so awesome.