From the course: Visual Studio Tools for Azure DevOps

What are Azure Repos?

From the course: Visual Studio Tools for Azure DevOps

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What are Azure Repos?

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- [Instructor] Version control systems are vital for all software projects. Being able to capture frequent copies of every team member's source code while working is essential for project sanity. All modern version control systems support using a common repository location, a place on the server or in the cloud where the shared code base is available, for every team member to access and update. In the Azure DevOps world, this is supported through the Azure Repos feature. Simply put, this is a location where you can store your repos in the Microsoft cloud servers. Each project in a DevOps organization has one dedicated repository. In my examples, I've got multiple projects, so I can have one repo per project. Currently, Azure Repos supports two flavors of source control, Git and Azure DevOps version control. Both systems handle all the common repository actions. You can commit and check in code changes, manage files and folders in the projects. You can create new code branches, and handle emerged conflicts too. There are differences. Azure DevOps Source Control, formerly called Team Validation Version Control, or TFVC, is a centralized client server system. In a centralized system, the server is in control. It has a master copy of everything in the system. Typically, team members only have one version of each file on their dev machines. Historical data is maintained only on the server. Branches are path-based and created on the server. Git is a distributed system, which means each developer has a copy of the entire source repository on their dev machine. Developers can commit each set of changes on their local machine, and perform version control operations such as History and Compare without a network connection. A single developer can work with Git repos on their local computer. When it's time to collaborate with others, or work on a software team, then it is sensible to clone the local repository to a shared location. This is called a Git Remote. Then team members can work locally and push their changes to the remote when ready. It won't surprise you to learn that Azure Repos is a hosting service for Git Remotes. To summarize, a team needs to use version control to manage code changes during development. Code repositories are more useful when available in a central, accessible location. In recent times, we've learned that distributed systems like Git offer many advantages for team development. There are many hosting options available for Git Remotes. If you want to use Microsoft hosting, look at Azure Repos or GitHub. Also, if you are oldschool and want to choose a centralized client server, Azure Repos has that option too.

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