GitSharp Project Working Toward Better Git for Windows

By porting Git to the .NET framework, the GetSharp team organized around Austrian developer Meinrad Recheis wants to achieve a better Git implementation for Windows. Recheis hasn't been happy with the current Msysgit implementation in that it isn't easily entendable to other software or developer environments. The .NET porting should provide a new perspective, seeing that Git can be an object database or distributed filesystem.

This small repository browser shows how the GitSharp library is applied.

According to the project the Mono community is already showing interest. With help from Novell's .NET implementation, Git# has rather convincingly gone cross-platform in heterogeneous environments.

The core of Git# is the

GitSharp.dll

created by porting the JGit Java library to C#, which allows Git# developers to stay close to Java code to create a functional library. The GitSharp library is currently 95% ported, the developer test suite reporting only about one percent errors. Git# is under BSD licensing, as is JGit.

The GitSharp team is also working on the

git.exe

program that provides users a command line interface. Version 0.1.0 already includes the

git init

and

git clone

commands (albeit the latter not over SSH).

The first official release and related details are on the GitSharp homepage. According to developer Recheis the beta version with a user-centric API should be available sometime in 2009, with a more stable version planned for the spring of 2010. The project is looking for contributors.