Which Distributed Source Control System has the best integration with Windows & Visual Studio?

Question

It seems that both git and mercurial are rather Linux oriented. Which of them is more mature on windows?

Answer 1

Mercurial and TortoiseHG are IMHO the only option for Windows platform when speaking about distributed systems. git is not as mature under Windows and and probably never be. git originally was supported on Windows under cygwin and later msysgit was created using msys as base. There is of course TortoiseGit which seem to be nice GUI but as you see there is already some irregularities.

With Mercurial its just simpler. So for true experience consider TortoiseHG especially that they just released version 1.0 finally which has many goodies inside.

Answer 2

Mercurial has by far the most mature GUI tools for Windows. TortoiseHG is very good as well.

Answer 3

Given the articles on SO I've been reading today, recommending that people turn off VCS integration plug-ins in Visual Studio, to make it run faster, I feel justified in keeping VCS operations out of the IDE.

Version 1.0 of TortoiseHg is getting very polished now, and it was perfectly stable and usable back at v0.5 when I started using it. It is definitely a mature product now, I'm just glad the developers have finally admitted it. *8')

Edit: I was looking at articles with tips for speeding up Visual studio. The only answer which I can find now which made this recommendation is this.

Answer 4

Using my favorite search engine I find:

1. VisualHG a mercurial plugin for VS
2. HgSSCPackage another mercurial plugin for VS
3. Git Extensions a git plugin for VS

I have not used any of these myself. I know Git is said to be less windows friendly but in my opinion this information is outdated furthermore this SO question might also be of interest. I guess this question really boils down to personal preference my suggestion would be to give each a try and see what you like best.

Answer 5

If you're looking for a strong integration with a DVCS inside Visual Studio:

Check the full tutorial here: http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/03/distributed-development-for-windows.html

Plastic provides you with all the distributed stuff you need and is specifically designed to work on Windows (ok, it does Linux and Mac OS too, but it shines on Windows)

Answer 6

I've been using msysgit with the included bash (shell) without issues... And it comes with the tab-completion hasen-j is missing in cmd.

If you're a fan of Tortoise(SVN/HG/CVS/etc), there is also TortoiseGit.