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Integrating GitHub on Visual Studio 2017 : Getting Started

For developers working on personal open source projects, GitHub has become the choice repository.  Sure we do love the geekiness of doing all our git related actions on the terminal ( command prompt for Windows ), but for productivity and efficiency, other developers would prefer an intuitive UI to save them from typing lengthy git commands. Luckily, there is a GitHub desktop app available for this. Yet, we developers, some times doesn't want to go out of our favorite IDE just to do a simple commit or pull while our mind is engaged on cranking the code that will save the world. Good thing, our friends are Microsoft are generous enough providing third party developers to create extensions or add-ins for their beloved Visual Studio. GitHub, thus, gave us a GitHub extension that can be integrated to Visual Studio 2017. The extension does not offer us out of this world features, just a way to do the git processes within Visual Studio. The good thing about it is it integrates seamlessly with the existing flow for managing processes with TFS. If you are familiar with these, then you are good to go.

Installation and Configuration

  1. Download the Visual Studio for GitHub extension here. Note that Visual Studio 2015 or newer is required.
  2. Install the extension. This requires that Visual Studio is closed.
  3. Open Visual Studio 2017. Go to TEAM -> Manage Connection.  The Team Explorer pane should include GitHub on the list of Hosted Service Providers.
  4. If you don't have existing GitHub account, choose Sign up. Otherwise, go ahead and sign in by selecting Connect.
  5. Once connected, the Team Explorer pane will display all GitHub repositories that you previously cloned or created under the GitHub section. All local repositories are available in your system will be listed under Local Repositories.

Your VS2017 is now ready to be used as a tool to work with GitHub repositories. 



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