Git best-practices with Visual Studio projects

Question

I want to use Git for some personal projects I work on. I'm new to git and don't know how to start...

Should I first create the project (say an ASP.NET MVC application) in Visual Studio and then turn the folder that is created into a repository, or should I create a repository first and then create the project inside that folder?

Also, are there any best-practises for how to structure the folders inside the "repository root folder"?

These are my two questions right now, but any pointers to articles etc for best-practises using Git and Visual Studio are welcome!

Answer 1

Git repositories are so lightweight that it doesn't really matter whether you create the project and then create the repo or create the repo and add the folders. You will anyway be doing a git add and git commit after the folders have been created.

But, for me, I usually create the project from VS and restructure the folders so that at the root there is the src folder and the .sln and project files are within the src folder. VS would typically create the root folder with the project name which I rename to src. Then I create the repo, add the standard .gitignore and .gitattributes and commit the repo.

See my preferred structure here: https://github.com/manojlds/cmd

Of course, you can have whatever structure you want.