One of the first things you figure out when working with Git is that like other source control providers, you want an easy way to exclude files from ending up on your source control to save yourself uploading items such as binaries and local user files (here’s looking at you Resharper!). By adding a .gitignore file to your repository you easily make this possible (if you’re using Windows, feel free to take a look at my post on creating these files successfully in Windows). The problem you have next is when you add a gitignore rule that’s a little too aggressive and your new project files fail to be picked up by Git, but you’re not quite sure which rule is the cause – this post shows you how you can troubleshoot these issues.

So you’ve got your own personal Git use dialled in, you’ve got a server environment configured with commits flying into your project like crazy, now you’re ready to start leveraging the power of Git with others. New workflows exist for distributed version control systems that offer big gains in terms of developer workflow, interaction, quality assurance and overall delivery process. Let’s take a look at one of them – GitFlow, so we can turn your team’s Git usage up to 11.

So you’ve got got your source code into Git, you’ve learned how to work with your repository in a basic fashion and you’ve pushed it onto another server for safe storage. There are a few more tricks to using Git that will make the journey easier and are worth looking at before continuing.  Although you’ll become more confortable with Git’s approach to source control over time knowing that the following features exist and how to use them will save you a lot later.

Centralised Version Control (VCS) providers like TFS and SVN always rely on a central server to store and maintain your project’s source control assets. While Git is an example “distributed” version control (DVCS) it is still most commonly used with developers relying on a central store for everyone to push and pull commits to and from. There are a number of options are your disposal so let’s take a look.

Few generations get to see as many epic battles for mindshare as our recent generations – in the 80’s it was VHS and Betamax and this decade we’ve seen Git and Mercurial duking it out. Developers have voted with their commits, and I’m pretty sure Git won the war. When setting our to use Git there are lots of basic tutorials, but none that approach it from a zero-to-hero in a team environment. In this blog series I am going to trying to set out to change all that by walking you through the steps from working in a non-Git source control environment to using DVCS with other people.

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of setting up a new build environment at work to replace our TFS Team Build setup and its build-information-opaqueness. In the process I uncovered a lot of not-so-fun-to-be-a-developer things that our large corporate IT Infrastructure team have in place to keep the masses at bay – one of those things is an NTLM proxy server. And so the head banging began – hopefully I can save you some brain cells and get you home on time.

One of the first things i was frustrated by when i first started using the distributed source control Git on windows was creating a .gitignore file as i couldn’t only ever seem to figure it out using the command line – but today i found an interesting hack.