So Visual Studio officially supports Git now. What does that mean?

Question

I just read an extremely interesting article that apparently as of this past Visual Studio 2012 update, it now has official Git support built in.

My question is, what does that mean exactly? Does this mean that TFS servers can now host Git repositories? Or, does Visual Studio use something like git-tfs behind the scenes to use regular TFS repositories with a Git bridge? Or does this apply to TFS servers at all? Also is using Git outside of Visual Studio which is hosted on TFS plain ol' vanilla git, or is it like the git-tfs bridge?

Also, is there any documentation yet about converting a TFS repository to a Git repository with this support?

Answer 1

Visual Studio Online hosts git repositories and provide integration to TFS work item tracking and builds. We store this information in a proper git repository - it's not a transparent git-tf bridge. Instead, we store git references and objects, although we store them in a SQL Server (SQL Azure) instead of a traditional on-disk git repository format. We do this to integrate with the existing TFS manageability and Team Foundation Service scaling.

Team Foundation Server, the on-premises product that resides in your data center, from TFS 2013 supports git repository hosting. Many features arrive on the hosted Visual Studio Online before arriving in the on-premises product.

Similarly, the Visual Studio integration is a proper git client - again, it's not git-tf. It uses the libgit2 and libgit2sharp projects to provide repository access to a local git repository, as well as network access to provide pushing and pulling to any git hosting service that speaks HTTP. (The SSH transport is not currently supported.) This means that you can push and pull to Bitbucket or GitHub, for example, you need not talk to Team Foundation Server.