Skip to main content

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. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Started with Stateless : A Lightweight Workflow Library Alternative for .NET

Image Credit: https://www.pioneerrx.com A year ago, I was looking for a simple workflow manager for a project I was working. Its a medium sized application that involves tracking the state of assets in the system. Back in 2008, Microsoft (MS) introduced new technologies along with the release of Visual Studio 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and  Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Having worked in a company utilizing mostly MS products for development, my first option was to go with WF. After doing some time reading and studying the library, I paused and decided it was too complex for my requirement. Using WF would be an overkill and the fact that it has, a rather, steep learning curve, there has to be another option. My mind toyed with the idea of developing a simple workflow library myself. It would be a learning experience but it might end up consuming a lot of time. Why reinvent the wheel? So I started querying the ...

Hiding Unwanted Python Folders and Files in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a universal editor and pretty good at it. However, the explorer view maybe cluttered with the automatically generated folders and files confusing developers. Python is no different. Below are example files and folders generated by Python. The __pycache__ folder and *.pyc files  are totally unnecessary to the developer. To hide these files from the explorer view, we need to edit the settings.json for VSCode. Add the folder and the files as shown below: Copy and paste the lines below : "**/*.pyc" : { "when" : "$(basename).py" }, "**/__pycache__" : true

The Story Behind the Name C#

I remember one time in an exam for employment , the first question was - who is the father of C#? I have been working with the language but never did I ask myself who actually started the language ( of course Mirosoft was the brainchild , right? ) . After a googling expedition I found out who was the culprit - Microsofts Anders Hejlsberg . I was not interested why it was called C# then , but opening my VS2008 today , I stumbled on one of the articles being shown at the VS2008 opening page - "Computer World: The A-Z of Programming : C#". Its an interview with Anders discussing the history and beyond of C# . Heres the cool part , the name for C# prior to its release was actually COOL (C like Object Oriented Language) . Below are some lines taken from the interview: Why was the language originally named Cool, and what promoted the change to C#? The code name was Cool, which stood for ‘C like Object Oriented Language’. We kind of liked that name: all of our files were called .coo...