July 16, 2018
We’ve been discussing the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and how we can use generation numbers to accelerate commit walks. One area where we can get significant speedup is when presenting output in topological order. This allows us to walk a much smaller list of commits than before. One place where this breaks down is... Read More
July 9, 2018
Earlier, we announced that Git 2.18 contains a new commit-graph feature, and we discussed the commit-graph file format. As shipped in Git 2.18, this file only speeds up commit walks by a constant multiple, due to parsing structured data from the commit-graph file. Today, we continue by talking about how we can use the idea... Read More
July 2, 2018
Earlier, we announced the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and talked about some of its performance benefits. Today, we’ll discuss some if the technical details about how the commit-graph feature works, including some helpful properties of its file format. This file speeds up commit-graph walks so much that we were able to identify other ways... Read More
June 25, 2018
Have you ever run gitk and waited a few seconds before the window appears? Have you struggled to visualize your commit history into a sane order of contributions instead of a stream of parallel work? Have you ever run a force-push and waited seconds for Git to give any output? You may be having performance... Read More
June 19, 2018
I’m excited to share the new navigation we’re working on for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to modernize the user experience and give you more flexibility. As Lori mentioned in her blog post, our goal to create an integrated suite that also gives the flexibly to pick and choose the services that work best for you. That goal is a common customer request and at... Read More
May 10, 2018
One of our DevOps “habits” is to Shift Left and move quality upstream. Including additional validations earlier in the DevOps pipeline means identifying potential issues before they become a problem. For teams using pull requests, catching issues while the PR is active is ideal – the code hasn’t been merged yet, so it’s easy to... Read More
May 1, 2018
One of the favorite parts of my job is curating a web site with the stories of how we work. Those experience reports and more of our guidance are now consolidated at https://aka.ms/devops. In addition to our own stories, this center offers content to help your team learn DevOps practices, Git (including Git at scale),... Read More
April 19, 2018
Whenever I talk to somebody about Git and version control, one question always comes up: How do you do your branching at Microsoft? And there’s no one answer to this question. Although we’ve been moving everybody in the company into one engineering system, standardizing on Git hosted in Visual Studio Team Services, what we haven’t... Read More
March 25, 2018
Now you can publish markdown files from a git repository to the VSTS Wiki. Developers often write SDK documents, product documentation, or README files explaining a product in a git repository. Such pages are often updated alongside code in the code repository. Git provides a friction free experience where code and docs can live on the... Read More
March 21, 2018
Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) users looking for a lightweight version control experience integrated into Windows File Explorer will be happy to see the latest release of the TFVC Windows Shell Extension. This tool provides convenient access to many TFVC commands right in the explorer context menu, and the latest release adds support for Team... Read More