And some said it would never happen. Github, the popular repository for many open-source code projects, now has a brand-new, first-ever Windows client. That means Windows developers building Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and pre-release Windows 8 applications can now share their work on the popular code bank.
The beauty of Github is that it lets groups of developers collaborate on projects without stepping on each other’s work. It lets team members working on a single project sync changes to make sure they are, in fact, working on one project, rather than multiple versions of the same project. That becomes very important as the size of the development group grows. It also allows work on private or public projects so that new developers can look at and learn from code posted by their forebears. As one developer put it recently, Github is “the social network of coding.”
The Github post announcing the news Monday morning said it all:
Ever wish there was an easy way to get up and running with Git and GitHub on your Windows computer? Turned off by command line utilities and setting up SSH keys? Want to join the incredible world of open and closed source collaboration that happens on GitHub.com every day?
Today we are releasing GitHub for Windows which is available immediately as a free download.
With the new Github for Windows, engineers can develop on Windows, share on Github. This is just the latest indication that Windows development is still in huge demand, even in precincts where the whole .NET/Windows world was looked on with disdain in the past. Amazon recently added managed SQL Server services and .NET support to Elastic Beanstalk. Tier 3 added .NET support to its Cloud Foundry PaaS implementation.
Ray Ozzie, the former chief technologist for Microsoft, gave Github a ringing endorsement at a Geekwire event a few months ago.
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