Microsoft is still playing catchup in the world of open source software, but it turned a corner on Wednesday, announcing that its Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 developer tools will both support Git, the version control system widely used by open source projects.
Git was created by Linus Torvalds -- the father of Linux -- and it has become one of the world's most popular code-management tools, gradually displacing long-time incumbents CVS and Subversion. It underpins the extremely popular code hosting/collaboration service GitHub, and it's so important to the way Google works that the company hired the project's current lead developers, Junio Hamano and Shawn Pearce, to work on Git full-time.
But Git doesn't support Windows. There's a fork of the project -- an alternative version -- called Git for Windows, and GitHub released a Windows application that includes a Microsoft friendly version of Git last year, but the official version of the project has never catered to Windows developers.
Microsoft is picking up some of this slack by integrating Git into Team Foundation Server, or TFS, a software suite that enables developers to collaborate on software and track bugs. It's known as an application lifecycle management tool. Users will now be able to choose between Git and Microsoft's own Team Foundation Version Control. Meanwhile, Visual Studio users will also be able to connect to Git repositories by downloading the free Visual Studio Tools for Git. The announcement came Wednesday at Microsoft's ALM Summit event in Redmond.
To enable support, Microsoft is using the libgit2 libraries, which are also used by GitHub for Windows. And as pointed out by Microsoft employee Scott Hanselman, several Microsoft employees are now actively contributing to libgit2.
Microsoft has started to recognize that if it wants popular open source software to run on Windows, it may have to build it itself. In recent years, the company has worked with Joyent to port the Node.js development platform to Windows, and with HortonWorks to bring the Hadoop big data platform to the Microsoft world. It has also ensured that Visual Studio plays nicely with popular languages such as JavaScript and Python.
