Git vs Team Foundation Server

People need to put down the gun, step away from the ledge, and think for a minute. It turns out there are objective, concrete, and undeniable advantages to DVCS that will make a HUGE difference in a team's productivity.

It all comes down to Branching and Merging.

Before DVCS, the guiding principle was "Pray to God that you don't have to get into branching and merging. And if you do, at least beg Him to let it be very, very simple."

Now, with DVCS, branching (and merging) is so much improved, the guiding principle is, "Do it at the drop of a hat. It will give you a ton of benefits and not cause you any problems."

And that is a HUGE productivity booster for any team.

The problem is, for people to understand what I just said and be convinced that it is true, they have to first invest in a little bit of a learning curve. They don't have to learn Git or any other DVCS itself ... they just need to learn how Git does branching and merging. Read and re-read some articles and blog posts, taking it slow, and working through it until you see it. That might take the better part of 2 or 3 full days.

But once you see that, you won't even consider choosing a non-DVCS. Because there really are clear, objective, concrete advantages to DVCS, and the biggest wins are in the area of branching and merging.

The key difference between the two systems is that TFS is a centralized version control system and Git is a distributed version control system.

With TFS, repositories are stored on a central server and developers check-out a working copy, which is a snapshot of the code at a specific point in time. With Git, developers clone the entire repository to their machines, including all of the history.

One benefit of having the full repository on your developer's machines is redundancy in case the server dies. Another nice perk is that you can move your working copy back and forth between revisions without ever talking to the server, which can be helpful if the server is down or just unreachable.

To me, the real boon is that you can commit changesets to your local repository without ever talking to the server or inflicting potentially unstable changes on your team (i.e., breaking the build).

For instance, if I'm working on a big feature, it might take me a week to code and test it completely. I don't want to check-in unstable code mid-week and break the build, but what happens if I'm nearing the end of the week and I accidentally bork my entire working copy? If I haven't been committing all along I stand the risk of losing my work. That is not effective version control, and TFS is susceptible to this.

With DVCS, I can commit constantly without worrying about breaking the build, because I'm committing my changes locally. In TFS and other centralized systems there is no concept of a local check-in.

I haven't even gone into how much better branching and merging is in DVCS, but you can find tons of explanations here on SO or via Google. I can tell you from experience that branching and merging in TFS is not good.

If the argument for TFS in your organization is that it works better on Windows than Git, I'd suggest Mercurial, which works great on Windows -- there's integration with Windows Explorer (TortoiseHg) and Visual Studio (VisualHg).

I think, the statement

everyone hates it except me

makes any further discussion waste: when you keep using Git, they will blame you if anything goes wrong.

Apart from this, for me Git has two advantages over a centralized VCS that I appreciate most (as partly described by Rob Sobers):

• automatic backup of the whole repo: everytime someone pulls from the central repo, he/she gets a full history of the changes. When one repo gets lost: don't worry, take one of those present on every workstation.
• offline repo access: when I'm working at home (or in an airplane or train), I can see the full history of the project, every single checkin, without starting up my VPN connection to work and can work like I were at work: checkin, checkout, branch, anything.

But as I said: I think that you're fighting a lost battle: when everyone hates Git, don't use Git. It could help you more to know why they hate Git instead of trying them to convince them.

If they simply don't want it 'cause it's new to them and are not willing to learn something new: are you sure that you will do successful development with that staff?

Does really every single person hate Git or are they influenced by some opinion leaders? Find the leaders and ask them what's the problem. Convince them and you'll convince the rest of the team.

If you cannot convince the leaders: forget about using Git, take the TFS. Will make your life easier.