xsharp.eu

I have applied for using Bitbucket for source control. I have a few questions especially for others using Bitbucket already.

First, I wondered why small teams (max 5 users) would pay Microsoft for private gits when you can get this for free from an Australian company not being Microsoft?

Second I am confused especially by one thing. When I create a repository in the Bitbucket cloud (website), as administrator, I can clone it to my local Pc using Sourcetree for it which asks a directory, e.g. e:BitBucketsomething. But after that I can't commit from Visual Studio; the option is not there. For that I first have to choose File/Add to source control. This creates a directory .git en 2 files .gitattributes en .gitignore within my project directory. If I would delete those, source control is gone.

But I want to commit changes to the local (cloned) copy of my Bitbucket repository, which resides on another disk (e:BitBucketsomething). Now I have two local repo's and I don't want the one created in my project directory.

Only alternative is using their program Sourcetree which simply watches directory content change and you can commit and pull/push from there, which I in this case rather do from Visual Studio.

How do I accomplish this?

Dick

Nobody is using Bitbucket?

For those who got themselves a paid subscription for private gits for Microsoft & have a team <6 people: what made you choose Microsoft instead of the free Bitbucket account?

Dick

Hi Dick,

IMHO the 300 USD per year for a company subscription is a very good value.
Specially for Cloud services I'm making the question: how this service is financed? And I prefer a paid account to make sure the service survives.
If I use services I'm willing to pay for them.

And since the X# development takes place on GitHub and also the X# Tools library will be developed on GitHub, I prefer to have only one tool to use.

Wolfgang

P.S. all my important web servers are running Linux, and also my file and database servers, but I use Exchange because it is currently the best email/contacts/calendar system

Hello Wolfgang,

IMHO the 300 USD per year for a company subscription is a very good value.

Yes, but 0 USD per year is even a better value

Specially for Cloud services I'm making the question: how this service is financed? And I prefer a paid account to make sure the service survives.

Apparently this is how it works nowadays. Many IT firms offer a free program; notice that X# can be used for free too. Also Robert must have considered that in the end a larger customer base with a small percentage ending up paying is better than a small base with everyone paying. Bitbucket free accounts are there since 2010 I read, so I guess they now what they are doing. What I do not know is: is their service working equally wel to that of Github, as I still have trouble trying to understand how to arrange my solutions such that I can easily store changes in a repo on a directory of my own choice (instead of the solution's project directory) and store those changes in a branch on the cloud server where others maintaining the same solution store their changes as well in the same way.

However, I don't think it works differently with Github and the lack of understanding has more to do with Visual Studio. What I do know is that I am not easily convinced to pay Microsoft for anything, in this case I mean by not using most of their products and services. As Github is now a Microsoft product, which will sooner or later be ruined by them, I would not want to help financing that. See for example Skype for which all users will be forced into the very often maligned version 8 per September 1, which a.o. misses the Away status present in version 7 and earlier.

For those of you who want to prepare for the the future of Github, read how users and journalist have seen the future of Skype being ruined by Microsoft, below a few links. Only thing for Github users is that it took them a full 7 years to do so for Skype but I am sure with Nadella they will ruin Github much quicker. And it doesn't matter that they use it themselves, I bet they use Skype themselves too.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/1597 ... n-feedback
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/m ... e-8-on-us/
https://mspoweruser.com/microsofts-new- ... its-users/
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.skype.com
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/ne ... ably-worse
https://www.reddit.com/r/skype/comments ... base_with/


Dick

Hi Dick,

Apparently this is how it works nowadays. Many IT firms offer a free program

for some this is a move to earn market share, and if this fails, they close down.

notice that X# can be used for free too. Also Robert must have considered that in the end a larger customer base with a small percentage ending up paying is better than a small base with everyone paying.

yes, I know that. But I'm paying and I encourage everyone using X# seriously to pay for it.

The main problem may be that competitors are free, and if someone not earns money working in X# or cannot afford to pay for it, it is ok that he can use it for free.

But note that the free version of the X# compiler is not the same as the paid version: sometimes it is behind for a month or two, and it is slower to compile because of the debug code.

About Skype: I hated that software years ago before it was acquired by Microsoft, and I hate it also today.
Skype may be used internally by Microsoft, but it is not essential to them.

GitHub was acquired by Microsoft because it is essential to them, and because they could not permit that some competitor buyed it.

For sure, I don't think Github will live forever - as nothing is forever.
If sometimes in the future there will be a better service, I'm sure also the X# project will migrate, and so will most projects.
Most projects have survived the shutdown of CodePlex, and so living projects will survive an eventual Github shutdown.

Microsoft unfortunately has ruined some products, but some products are very succesful on the markted, like Windows, Office, Azure, SQL Server, Exchange and some more.

But this is how the world is going: new companies and products appear, become successful and later their disappear. Do you remember Compaq or DEC or Novell? Their were really successful, but are gone now.

I don't think you are doing yourself a favor with your negative thinking about Microsoft.... I don't like Visual Studio too, but fortunately I have an alternative. Microsoft has some very good products, and some that are not worth their money, but that is normal on this world.

Wolfgang

Hello Wolfgang,

I agree with most of what you write, like paying for X#, except that I did not dislike Skype but saw it gradually getting worse since Microsoft bought it. Not sure if Microsoft products which are successful are also good however. I actually do like a few Microsoft products, like OneNote but again this is being killed by Microsoft by pushing users towards the UWP OneNote which lacks features, writing to your own disk being the most important. I also like the Windows Phone; need I say more?

That's why I am almost 100% sure that some unpleasant surprise will await Github users in the future. I can't yet say if Bitbucket works alike, but if so it's a good idea to make a choice for the non Microsoft alternative right now. And finally, there's a big different between negative thinking of Microsoft products and services and negative experiences. Even when I start think positive it ends negative, usually. Unfortunately.

Dick

Hi Dick,

Not sure if Microsoft products which are successful are also good however.

It depends, I think. Exchange for sure has its problems, but it is better than the alternatives.
Exchange Online works very well, I have several customers that are using it and are happy with it.
Windows IMHO is becoming better and better - with Windows 10 really stable and secure, specially when compared to older Windows versions like XP, 2000 or 9x. Windows 10 has some things I don't like, but in the important areas it is much better than Windows 7 or Windows 8.x.
I don't think SQL Server is better than Oracle or PostgreSQL, but commercially it is successful.
Office is a good product - but it was it also in older versions. Since 2010 it is really stable, and works well, and it is hard to make it better (you don't like the ribbons, I know). And specially the OLE/COM interface to Office applications is really important for us programmers.
For Azure I cannot say anything, because I have never used it.
Windows Server is good for us programmers as it is Windows, and we can use it to run our products on it. Linux Servers may be more stable and faster, but they are harder to administer and have their problems too.

For Windows phone: seing the market share of Android and iOS I had never expected that this system could have success, therefore I had never buyed one (I'm really happy with my Nexus Phone).

You may be right that often the excellent products don't survive because they are not succesful on the market - the story is full of them. And often not the best product survives, but the one with the best marketing.
IMHO Nadella is much better for Microsoft (and for us as developers) as Ballmer: he has opened Microsoft to the Linux world and has killed the attitude of a monopolist on the OS system market.
And I like the idea of a continually developed Windows 10: so the story of XP (and soon 7) will never repeat. The semi-annual updates may introduce some problems, but the OS itself gets better and stabler from version to version.

Wolfgang

Hello Wolfgang,

We used Azure for 3/4 year (part of Action Pack) and it's dreadfully slow. I wonder who is actually paying for subscription as a bit more than the yearly fee would already buy you a simple server which is also faster.

I don't think Nadella is better (or worse) than Ballmer; the Linux move is only because Microsoft is losing it's position and Microsoft is unable to make a success of any acquisition.

Market share of Windows 10 is still disappointing; I agree that it's generally better than W7 but a disturbing number of W7 users refuse(d) to move even when this was free. Microsoft's policy of thinking they know what's good for the user and the user in their opinion being stupid if they don't want it has costed lots of users. In W10 my general feeling is that people use it because they need an OS but whatever Microsoft adds to it: most people couldn't care less. See Edge with falling market shares almost every month, Windows Timeline, Ink, Cortana, mixed reality - they keep adding unasked features but I can easily create a list of 10 bugs or shortcomings in Windows, some present forever, which are never solved. Instead of addressing such issues they keep adding unwanted and often plain irritating 'features'.

So I am less positive about what Microsoft is doing than you are.

Dick

Hi Dick,

We used Azure for 3/4 year (part of Action Pack) and it's dreadfully slow. I wonder who is actually paying for subscription as a bit more than the yearly fee would already buy you a simple server which is also faster.

it depends really what you need. If you have an application that runs all the year, a dedicated or virtual server may be the better option.
But if your needs are changing, you have some peaks, and a lot of time where do don't need anything, a cloud server may be the better option.

But the main thing for Azure is not to "rent" servers, but to rent services, like disk space, database, processing power etc. If you are using a cloud database or diskspace, you have not to care about space, uptime, etc. The space is there, the more you need, the more you pay. For many applications that is very good, and for others bad.

We have a few servers running for some applications (PHP and MySQL), but two years ago images we had to save were going to fill up our 2 TB disk. We decided to put them on AWS, and now we are paying about 30 Euros a month to have more than 2 TB of image files in the "cloud" - we don't have to worry about full disk, backup etc., it works really good.

Wolfgang