Automating Git commands

As mentioned in the introduction, there are numerous version control systems available and this chapter is going to focus on one of the more popular ones, Git. We will be using Git in this chapter since it is very commonly used in the development community. Also, it is supported by Microsoft in Azure as well as GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018. Most of the other SCM providers behave very similarly, and the techniques we'll discuss can be applied to them as well.

We are about to show you how to do in each flavor of Visual Studio can also be done via the command line. In fact, many developers prefer to use the command line for source control tasks, particularly advanced scenarios. However, common needs are handled by Visual Studio just fine and that is going to be the focus of this chapter's content.

Alternative GUIs

In addition to Visual Studio, lots of developers install tools that are more geared towards a visual experience, such...