Visual Studio 2013 and libgit2

Visual Studio 2013 RTM was made available this morning which means that the new Git support in Visual Studio is available to everyone!

The Git support within VS is something that we're super excited about and it reflects a lot of hard work from a number of teams within Microsoft as well as the greater Git community at large. Obviously we're taking advantage of the excellent work that the Git community has done in building the repository format, and in order for Visual Studio to be a git client, it needs to interact with the repository just like git does.

But hidden behind the scenes is the crucial part of our Git support: a powerful little project called libgit2, and another called libgit2sharp, that provide lovely APIs for dealing with Git repositories.

These libraries are so good - and so transparent - that I've been asked several times: "how do I see the git commands that are being executed?" And indeed you cannot, because there actually aren't any. All of our repository interaction - cloning, checking out, committing, pushing - they're all done using libgit2. We never shell out to calling the git command line.

We couldn't have brought Git support to Visual Studio without the libgit2 and libgit2sharp projects, and we're very grateful for all the hard work from those communities. Thanks guys!