The last few months’ funny things have been happening. One of them was people contacting me in case of Git issues. I do not consider myself to be a Git expert, not even close, but I do know how it works and where to look in case of issues. But, only a few months ago I, like many .NET developers out there, only worked with Git from a GUI. In my case that was Sourcetree. I thought I knew what I was doing and mostly just committed and pushed changes. My history was filled with meaningless messages, multiple incomplete commits that should actually be joined together and a history that turned into Guitar Hero.

But something happened. One of my colleagues at Mobile Vikings decided to give a session about Git to explain the interesting and lesser known stuff. Given that he had a Linux background, everything was demonstrated in the console. And I realized something. The only way I would ever get to really know Git was if I switched to the console. That decision triggered a few others like creating PS-Agnoster and starting to give presentations about Git myself.

And what initially started out as a personal guide for my slides turned into a little book to assist Visual Studio users in using Git inside and outside of their IDE. I clearly state inside and outside because I do not want this to turn into a war between the console and GUI. I don’t care. You should know how to handle both. It’s impossible to turn away from Git as a developer in this day and age. There are no alternatives (something I’d gladly start a war over), which means it has to become part of your skill-set.

While this very guide is directed towards .NET developers, it can be used by anyone who is looking for a bit more information into how Git works and how you can use it to get a better workflow (or to find hidden gems you did not know about). There are a few sections which still need to be added, you can look forward to those in the coming month, but I did not want to wait any longer to present this to you all.

Have fun reading and if you have any tips you’d like to share, do not hesitate to contact me. It would be awesome to include even more cool tips and tricks!

You can download a PDF version here.