I am aware of VFP with Plasctic SCM source controk but would like it to do it with Git.

Anyone using Git as source cpntrol for VPF? Can ypu talk about your experience

Thanks,

Alex

I'm using Git for all of my development and a while back also retro fitted existing VFP projects to use GIT. It works reasonably well with VFP, but is more difficult than other platforms because of the binary nature of VCX/SCX/MCX etc. files. For those binary files you need some workarounds with tools that flatten these files to text so they can be effectively compared and aren't updating each time. There are a number of tools available for this. Personally I don't use those because I don't use VCX/SCX etc. much and I can live with manually tracking those files and only updating them when they really change.

All I can say is that Distributed Source Control is awesome and I would never go back to a server based system like Source Safe, Vault, or even something like Subversion. A DCS allows you to work locally, including making local commits and optionally allows you to sync or push/pull to a server. Being able to work locally lets you be offline and sync later if you do shared development, and it's blazing fast while you're working. It drives you into a commit frequently workflow. Further, because it's so easy and fast to switch between branches or even previous checkins with a simple command it's easy to create experimental branches that you can work in parellel with your live branches and then either discard or merge the changes.

For Git has been one of those developer experiences that has totally changed how I work. Add to that the various open repositories like Github and bitbucket that make it so easy to share repositories with others, it's a been an enlightening experience that's made it so much easier to collaborate.

Git takes a bit to get used to though - it's very different than classic SCM, and at first a lot of concepts seem counter intuitive or like they just wouldn't work. I was initially afraid of constant merge conflicts for example. However, I've found even on large projects with lots of churn merge conflicts are very rare which seems surprising at first. Git is amazingly good at merging content and once you find the right work flow using frequent push and pull operations conflicts are very rare.

Anyway, if you haven't tried a DCS like Git or Mercurial I'd highly recommend trying it out. If you're not using source control at all DEFINITELY check it out - it's a crime to not be using source control when you can use a local repository that makes it easy to archive and allow you to go back to any point in time at will.

Hope this helps,

+++ Rick ---

Ok, so this is an old one about git. Rick, are you using git local or have you moved to GitHub?

Everything I do is pretty much on GitHub or BitBucket (Github mostly now that private repos are free).

The nice thing about Git is you get to choose whether you want to keep it all local or stash it on a cloud based repo. It's very easy to move things in either direction and most importantly you are always offline even if you don't have an Internet connection until you explicitly decide to sync.

+++ Rick ---