GitHub branch… Get it?! A branch for Windows? Ok well it’s early… 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? Guess what… GitHub just released a Windows client.

GitHub for Windows client released

GitHub is a version tracking and collaboration platform for developers. It’s pretty popular with the open source crowd given that Linus started it that’s no surprise. There’s been one glaring issue with the dev hub, though –no official Windows client. You could always use command line tools and SSH, but sometimes that’s just not what you’re looking for… and not what some Windows developers are used to. Now Microsoft users have a slick client that wraps up all your favorite git functionality like ability to merge branches and roll back changes, clone repositories, branch, etc. To top it off it’s all wrapped in pretty Metro-friendly package.

I couldn’t be more excited since I’m a (primarily) Windows developer and I’ve just started delving into GitHub. The GitHub site notes

Under the Covers of the new GitHub for Windows

The application is written in C# and uses a ton of great open source projects, many of them hosted on GitHub:

• libgit2 provides a beautiful and fast API for Git repositories and we take advantage of the stellar C# bindings.
• msysGit fills in the gaps and lets us provide a fully functional version of core Git to distribute with the application.
• We love PowerShell and have bundled Keith Dahlby’s amazing posh-git.
• We’ve mashed up the elegant Caliburn.Micro with ReactiveUI to provide a responsive interface and to allow for greater testability.
• The Reactive Extensions (Rx) for .NET provide the ability to compose asynchronous and event-based code using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators.
• Local README rendering is provided courtesy of the Chromium Embedded Framework and the C# bindings.
• We make heavy use of the GitHub API v3 and leverage James Newton-King’sJson.NET and John Sheehan’s RestSharp.

If you’re interested it’s just waiting for you… go check it out!

Source: GitHub for Windows