Microsoft Announces Open Source Git To Tfs Bridge
Microsoft has open sourced Git-tf which serves as a bridge between Git and TFS.
If you already live in both the Git and TFS worlds, this new tool may look eerily like the existing Git-tfs OSS project. Well, you are right - they are very similar. As starting a new OSS project that’s very like another is generally considered pretty bad form, I want to say a few words about this.
When we decided that we really wanted to have a good Git/TFS integration solution, the first thing we thought of was to reach out to Matt Burke who owns the existing Git-tfs solution.
Matt Mitrik had a great conversation with him about what we were looking to do and the general direction he was taking the project. One of our big requirements was to create a cross platform solution that works just as well on Windows, Linux or MacOS. That really wasn’t in the sights for the existing Git-tfs project and, together, we agreed that separate, cross platform solution made sense. Hence Git-tf was born.
I agree with the analysis - Git-Tfs is a C# project and Microsoft’s objective was to create a cross platform tool. Currently, the only way to run C# code on multiple platforms is through the Mono project. Since Git-Tfs uses the TFS client libraries from Microsoft to communicate with the TFS server, there has been no clear way for Mono users to install the required libraries on platforms other than Windows. There was an open source client library for TFS, but it appears to have been abandoned. Microsoft on the other hand, was able to use the Java library they acquired from Teamprise, which communicates with TFS servers.
Overall, I think that this is a Good Thing. Git-Tf will allow more developers to use Git, which at the end of the day is what is important.