Presenting Git for Windows again

A couple of years back I did a talk for the local .Net user group on how to use Git on Windows. I also wrote about my Git setup on Windows. Even though I don't do a lot of work in this environment, I figured I could contribute a lot of good tips and experience as a somewhat seasoned Git user.

Since then a few things have happened, so next week I'm heading back to Bonn-to-Code.Net to refresh their memories on what Git is about, and what has changed since last time.

Update: Talk done. Recording and slides can be found here.

So what has changed since last time then?

Microsoft has fully adopted Git as their (second) version control system of choice.
Git projects can be hosted inTeam Foundation Server, as well as on VisualStudio.com (which is kind of like TFS in the cloud).
You can operate Git repositories from within Visual Studio (without installing any extra Git tooling, thanks to libgit2).

On the desktop, you can and should still install MsysGit if you're going to use Git - Visual Studio 2013 even assists you in doing so - it will suggest to install it when you init or clone a Git project, and semi-automatically install it for you if you want.

What you maybe don't need anymore is the Git Extensions tool for Visual Studio. Git Extensions is a good standalone Git GUI, but I don't think you'll be needing it inside Visual Studio anymore (unless you are on something older than Visual Studio 2012, which supports Git).

Another thing that has changed is that HTTPS has become much more popular and accepted for Git authentication. As a result, I'll completely skip the awkward SSH setup instructions in my talk (have a look at my old post if you still want to get this working).

Finally, Git usage is now way up from where it was two years ago. Based on some rough estimates from open source trackers, we can assume that Git is nearly at Subversion's level in open source. I imagine that most businesses out there with a tad of innovation have done some Git experimenting by now.

Oh, and I now prefer cmder (based on ConEmu) over Console2. Hat-tip to Hanselman's tool list.

Most of the things I know about Microsoft's Git involvement I learned from Martin Woodward when I had him on GitMinutes. There's a lot of interesting history and information in that episode so do have a listen if you get the chance.

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password...

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config...