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Ah source code at MS. Always amusing to me. VSS [1] (Visual Source Safe) was terrible and I always wondered how "real" companies could use it. From what I heard

Ah source code at MS. Always amusing to me. VSS [1] (Visual Source Safe) was terrible and I always wondered how "real" companies could use it. From what I heard, MS never did use it, they bought it and sold licenses. That's it. That being said, Microsoft actually moved Windows to Git [2] years and years ago. Presumably they did the same with everything else. Team Foundation Server (TFS) supports Git, so they probably have the critical stuff on that TFS still, rather than GitHub. Especially since those repo's are huge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/microsoft-hosts-the-windows-source-in-a-monstrous-300gb-git-repository/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/micro...

DiabloD3 6y ago
They moved to Git, from what I can tell as an outsider, as part of the "Balmer fucked Microsoft" clean up duty that produced a toxic and soon-to-be-fatal culture over there. Github ended up being the final piece they needed after years of effort. Most of what I said in the earlier comment was what I pieced together from multiple (ex-)Microsoft people who chose to talk about it, over years. TFS afiact started as just a repo manager (in the sense, does what Github does) for VSS and Perforce, with more modern support for other things, including Microsoft's gargantuan Git monorepo... but a lot of people at Microsoft still like Github Enterprise better. I imagine given this, whatever TFS does better, Github Enterprise will learn to do over the next few years. Microsoft is big on eating their own dogfood now, but they don't seem to want to do Google sillyness where they have 20 products that do the same thing and let them fight it out in FFA arena combat (even Lync is still Lync underneath, it just keeps getting new frontends).
- aksss 6y ago
  > Lync is still Lync mmm.. I know what you're saying but the change to Teams from a VOIP perspective substantially changed some of the under-the-hood stuff. They stood up a facade to offer luke-warm integration from SfB/Lync IP phones (authentication and basic calling, but that's about it). AFAIK this wasn't just a breaking change but a re-arch of some of the backend. Point being, they may be evolutions but the move to Teams is not just a new front-end. Substantial evolution has happened since we first installed server stacks to support Lync, even though we still see Lync fingerprints and junk dna everywhere.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Actually if you are taking a stab at Teams I met a developer who said the lead architect did work on Lync but it is in fact from scratch.
RandallBrown 6y ago
I left Microsoft around 2013 when the transition to Git was announced. At the time, most teams (that I encountered) used something called Source Depot. I was told that back in the day, MS licensed the source code from Perforce, forked it, and that became Source Depot. I do know there were some teams using TFS and I'm sure there were some smaller teams using Git too. I'm not sure how the transition went, since I left before it started, but I would bet it's still at least somewhat ongoing. Some of the people on my team that had been at MS for awhile were EXTREMELY skeptical of change.

DiabloD3 6y ago

They moved to Git, from what I can tell as an outsider, as part of the "Balmer fucked Microsoft" clean up duty that produced a toxic and soon-to-be-fatal culture over there. Github ended up being the final piece they needed after years of effort. Most of what I said in the earlier comment was what I pieced together from multiple (ex-)Microsoft people who chose to talk about it, over years. TFS afiact started as just a repo manager (in the sense, does what Github does) for VSS and Perforce, with more modern support for other things, including Microsoft's gargantuan Git monorepo... but a lot of people at Microsoft still like Github Enterprise better. I imagine given this, whatever TFS does better, Github Enterprise will learn to do over the next few years. Microsoft is big on eating their own dogfood now, but they don't seem to want to do Google sillyness where they have 20 products that do the same thing and let them fight it out in FFA arena combat (even Lync is still Lync underneath, it just keeps getting new frontends).

aksss 6y ago
> Lync is still Lync mmm.. I know what you're saying but the change to Teams from a VOIP perspective substantially changed some of the under-the-hood stuff. They stood up a facade to offer luke-warm integration from SfB/Lync IP phones (authentication and basic calling, but that's about it). AFAIK this wasn't just a breaking change but a re-arch of some of the backend. Point being, they may be evolutions but the move to Teams is not just a new front-end. Substantial evolution has happened since we first installed server stacks to support Lync, even though we still see Lync fingerprints and junk dna everywhere.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
Actually if you are taking a stab at Teams I met a developer who said the lead architect did work on Lync but it is in fact from scratch.

RandallBrown 6y ago

I left Microsoft around 2013 when the transition to Git was announced. At the time, most teams (that I encountered) used something called Source Depot. I was told that back in the day, MS licensed the source code from Perforce, forked it, and that became Source Depot. I do know there were some teams using TFS and I'm sure there were some smaller teams using Git too. I'm not sure how the transition went, since I left before it started, but I would bet it's still at least somewhat ongoing. Some of the people on my team that had been at MS for awhile were EXTREMELY skeptical of change.