Git (SSH) in Visual Studio 2015

Question

So with Visual Studio 2015 just being released there is a much more integrated tie-in with git.

However the feature that seems to be lacking is git over SSH. There are various plugins for 2013 that allow this functionality (i.e GitExtensions) but I can't see any with 2015.

GitHub plugin only appears to work with GitHub and not generic git repos.

I'm not looking for an opinion of which is better, only some examples or articles to see if anyone has got Git+SSH on Visual Studio 2015 working.

Answer 1

No. Visual Studio 2015 (RTM) does not support SSH for Git remotes. This is true even with GitHub repositories using the GitHub plug-in (which - at present - uses the same connection mechanism for Git repositories as any other Git repository using Team Explorer.)

This is regrettable, but there are a handful of reasons why this is not available yet: the short answer is that in our opinion, providing SSH poorly or insecurely is worse than not providing SSH at all, and we would like to be very confident that any SSH implementation we provide is of high-quality.

That said, we are working on it, and making progress. Microsoft is going to begin including OpenSSH in Windows (and is a sponsor of that very fine project). However I cannot make any predictions as to when support might be available.

The GitHub extension is open source, so it's possible that it may be able to use a different connection mechanism and begin supporting SSH before the core Git support in Team Explorer.