How to commit and visualize code on different branches in Visual Studio – 089

Yesterday’s tip visualized what happens in Visual Studio (and in Git) when you create a branch. Today’s tip visualizes committing code independently in different branches.

First, you’ll see how to commit to separate branches in Visual Studio, then we’ll rinse and repeat in the Git Visualization tool.

Committing to Different Branches in Visual Studio

In this example, I’ve rolled back to the Console Application with only output message. We’re going to add the ChangeColor() method and call on a branch called addColor.

ChangeColor() committed to addColor branch in Team Explorer

Once you’ve pressed Commit All to addColor, you’re going to discover that you want to experiment with decorations. You can use Team Explorer – branches to create a new branch called decorations.

You’ll want to use master because you want to keep the addColor changes separate from your decorations branches.

Creating a new local branch from master in Team Explorer

and you’ll want to verify you were on master in the dropdown

creating branch from master called decorations

Add your decorations to your project file

adding more output decoration text

And now commit those changes to your decorations branch.

committing to decoration branch

And now we have 2 different commits on 2 different branches

3 branches in Team Explorer

Visualization of what we just did

First, we’ll want to create and checkout a branch called addColor and make some changes there.

git commit, checkout -b addColor, commit visualization

Next, we’ll want to switch back to master and create a new branch from there.

git checkout master, git checkout -b decorations visualization

Finally, we’ll make a commit on the decorations branch.

git commit on decorations branch visualization

I keep trying to remind myself that whenever I do a checkout, reset, etc. I’m not really going forward and backward in time, but rather I’m moving to a different nodes on a graph. Visualizing what git is doing helps break my timeline mental model.

4 thoughts on “How to commit and visualize code on different branches in Visual Studio – 089

  1. Hello Sarah, this series about git are awesome. Do you know if it’s possible to use a commit template inside visual studio?


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