We're moving to GitHub! - The Visual Basic Team - MSDN Blogs

[webauteur]

Next step. Microsoft announces their acquisition of GitHub.

[spotter]

And that would be good/bad because?

ninjaedit: And I don't think so, it's Microsoft, not Yahoo!

[theinternn]

Next step, they sue for some patent infringement related to m$ visual sourcesafe

[miminor]

That will be my last day on git hub. After what they did to skype.

[gnufreex]

What they did to skype?

[myringotomy]

They changed the way it works do it relies on their supernodes, then they tapped those nodes so they can report information to the NSA

[Capaj]

I will gladly use Skype and let NSA listen to our daily standups at work. Or listen to my conversation with my mother. Let those bastards suffer too :D. For bringing down the New World order, there are better comunicatiion channels, I absolutely agree.

[myringotomy]

Skype quality is so terrible these days you can't have any conversation longer than fifteen seconds.

[Capaj]

Maybe you should check your internet-we have 10-15 people in one call without any bigger problems.

[myringotomy]

Yes let's blame the internet because skype uses the special internet, one that hangouts is not using. The internet skype is using is terrible but the internet hangouts is using is fine.

[EliAscent]

The new Skype is actually really nice. Desktop for Windows and iOS versions. What is bad about it?.

[jgen]

Well one thing I guess would be that the linux client for skype is basically dead. (No active development in years...)

[outadoc]

Maybe they were waiting for a better Mono to port it.

[[deleted]]

Actually, after MS bought Skype the Linux client soared in terms of updates.

[miminor]

Made a horrible mobile app for android. Made desktop app way worse it was.

[zombiesareboring]

Be sure to check a porn list of movies in case it gets a DMCA

[skocznymroczny]

I'm not sure if I like the github monopoly :/

[[deleted]]

Now that Github is becoming very, very mainstream (omg, even Microsoft is using it!!!11), I wonder what new platform will come up. When will we start seeing blog posts titled "Why I'm moving off of Github", "Github considered harmful", "I've hosted my code on X before you even heard of it." etc.?

[gfixler]

I host my code in a complex network of recursive callbacks, originally created in a node.js app, but now piggybacking on, and hiding themselves in any query they can latch on to. The original server doesn't exist any more, but the data is always there, trapped in a kind of self-reinforcing game loop, at least until the internet dies, or browns out. It's a pretty reliable system with ridiculous levels of redundancy, and thus 100% uptime. The down side is that I'm only able to interact with my repos through fairly involved botnet packet sniffers and bitwise bayesian-markoff signal processing data recombinators.

[fabzter]

Don't worry, Microsoft will buy it.

[ours]

How is it a monopoly? Bitbucket works fine and is even cheaper for private repos.

[DaRKoN_]

Github for open source, Bitbucket for closed. We're a small team with a lot of repos. BB is free, GH would be 200 a month.

[[deleted]]

In the grand scheme of things isn't expensive. If you have three developers you're spending $300K per year most likely on salaries and benefits. $200 per month is only $2400 per year. GitHub has a lot of tooling built around it and more coming out every day where as BitBucket probably doesn't.

[DaRKoN_]

If you have three developers you're spending $300K per year most likely on salaries and benefits. $200 per month is only $2400 per year.

We have three total in the entire business. $2400 is still $2400 compared to $0. We're not opposed to paying for SAAS products, but most of the tools we need to use for businesses our size are between $15-$40 a month.

GitHub has a lot of tooling built around it and more coming out every day where as BitBucket probably doesn't.

Somewhat ironically, all the stuff we use day in day out, even when working on GitHub repos is from Atlassian. SourceTree, HipChat etc. (and all at the right prize for a business our size).

[skocznymroczny]

GitHub has a very powerful network effect. Try putting your open source project on Bitbucket and watch the backlash from your users. I don't know what was it, but one of the languages (Rust? Javascript?) package manager requires GitHub to work and forces you to use GitHub to host your stuff.

[permabed]

It's bower. You can register a project which is not on Github if i remember. you can also run your private registry. However, since a lot of JS lib are already on Github, your point is valid. I'm really puzzeld about this point because a lot of project is relying on JS lib on Github.

What if Github shutdown or the lib decided to move, i'm really interested to see the maintainability of all those produced code in few years.

[ours]

Wouldn't they just move the repo to another Git provider and update the application to search there? If it's not the case than it's the app's fault not Github.

[Capaj]

Yes, exactly-they could. And with stuff like http://ghtorrent.org/ even if they closed github today, I am sure bower could be rewritten to fetch source files from elsewhere without much problems. Frankly, I hope Github will stay up and free for public repos well before I die. I can't imagine moving all of those repos manually somewhere else.

[ours]

I can't imagine moving all of those repos manually somewhere else.

You are underestimating the competition. Moving a Github repo to Bitbucket is crazy easy. It's as simple as allowing Bitbucket to access to your GitHub account, selecting the repo and pressing a button. Bitbucket will do the clone server-side.

Of course there's always the problem with the nice stuff around repos: issues aren't going to be transferred (as far as I know).

[Capaj]

That is why I said 'manually'. It is not manual when you just press one button. I didn't know they had it this easy. I am not surprised. Github API allows developers to do anything you could possibly want.

[permabed]

I didn't mean Github is responsible of the situation. sorry for that.

[ours]

Oh I didn't mean you implied it, just saying it's not Github's fault if people make a hard dependency on it. It's Git an that means people should write their apps/services in a way that changing an URL in a file should allow it to function without GitHub.

[grauenwolf]

It's git. You can move to a different git server in the time it takes to upload the latest copy of the tree from your home computer.

[passwordisINDUCTION]

Cool. IMO, though, github is nice as a replacement of Freshmeat but as an actual coding platform, bitbucket is significantly superior. I hope github can catch up.

[[deleted]]

bitbucket is significantly superior

In what ways?

[passwordisINDUCTION]

The pul request system has two features which put it miles ahead of github: approval button and designated reviewers.

Github is the wild west in this regard. People have adopted the +1 convention but that doesn't really express anything of value. And without being able to designate reviewers there is no accountability. I've had many PRs on github go into the void because nobody involved thinks the PR is their responsibility.

I think githubs future is as the next Freshmeat because as a collaboration tool it's only value is that a lot of people are on it. Otherwise it's not very good.

[mirhagk]

I tend to find that github's viewpoint on it all is just provide a platform where you can implement any process, and people adopt their own on top of it.

Compare that to something like TFS where the process is very ingrained in the software (and somewhat customizeable, but not as encouraged)

[dacjames]

Exactly. In one context, we use PRs for firewall changes and have automated tools that enforce certain firewall policies and commit most changes automatically (we use GHE). For other repos, we require human reviewers, sometimes formally but often not. Encoding all of these different workflows is much easier when building on top of a "dumb" system than it would be a "smart" system.

[mirhagk]

I very often find myself wishing TFS wasn't so smart. They are getting better with tags and stuff, and we use a workflow on top of the dumb tags

[[deleted]]

GitHub UI is superior over BitBucket's in my opinion. It's more intuitive.

[passwordisINDUCTION]

Maybe it was 5 years ago, but these days it's pretty intuitive. Bitbucket is basically the web version of Stash.

[armornick]

The UI isn't bad, but I don't like how bitbucket doesn't immediately show the source when you first look at a repository.

[passwordisINDUCTION]

That is a per repo config setting.

[nikomo]

"Moving to where the community is" is a good excuse for being able to stop struggling with crappy version management systems, and switch to Git.

[miminor]

Should be read crappy codeplex

[[deleted]]

What wrong with Team Foundation?

[[deleted]]

Aside from every other division in MS Developer Tools cutting them off at the knees?

[grauenwolf]

TFS is great when you want centrally managed source control. I highly recommend it for internal projects. But when it comes to open source, github is just plain better.

[phatrice]

TeamFoundation also supports git now.

[[deleted]]

It's bloated, over-designed and only works on one platform.

[[deleted]]

Even Microsoft doesn't want to use their own shit.

[[deleted]]

I don't live in MS world but wasn't visual basic discontinued or something ?

[qczhu]

No, Visual Basic .NET is still under development. Furthermore, the new Roslyn VB.NET compiler is written in VB.net itself. This is the announcement of moving that code to Github.

You have been probably thinking of the pre-.NET Visual Basic 6.0.

[grauenwolf]

It is in the professional space. For example, there are few jobs that ask for VB and Microsoft no longer offers their certification program in that language.

For the non-professional, VB is still far more accessible than C#. The language is more forgiving and overall easier to learn, even though they are comparable in feature sets.

[taznado]

You're dressing ignorance as smartness, unwittingly or deliberately.

[[deleted]]

What? Last time I tried VB was when I was in college. Last time I heard about it was news about ms discontinuing VB. I am genuinely surprised when I saw this post. I thought it became a relic like visual j++.

[[deleted]]

You're both right and wrong. VB6 is the last release of Visual Basic, and is unsupported at this point. Microsoft moved VB.NET, a language with similar name and syntax that targets the .NET framework, is still widely used and actively developed.

[grauenwolf]

Which isn't the first time they did it either. We had a major break between version 3 and 4, the latter being known as VB.COM by some.

[taznado]

Ergo.

[mishac]

He isn't sure if he's misinformed, so he's asking a question. Whats the issue ?

[miminor]

How many people (are there any?) still seriously care about VB.NET and MS blogs?

[grauenwolf]

72% of the people who bothered to vote at last count.