Visual Studio Team Services

VSTS is a service company typically prefer using, as it's more private, and lacks the community-style approach to sharing and publishing your code. VSTS builds upon the older TFS style, but at the same time, it's a modern and fresh take on performing the whole ALM process and Agile project management tooling within a single service.

You can provision a new VSTS account at https://www.visualstudio.com/. The basic service is free for up to five users, which typically is sufficient for smaller SharePoint Framework projects.

If you own a Visual Studio subscription, you can also access the basic services of VSTS.

VSTS has an amazing selection of tools and services, which can be easily configured to support your ALM process, big or tiny.

Initially, you can just use VSTS as a place to store your code and not worry about much else. Later, when your project grows larger, you can involve additional aspects of VSTS, such as automated testing, user load testing, and automatic builds and deployments. This is essentially useful when you have multiple developers, and possibly a project manager, working towards a common goal. Several manual steps can be automated, thus project resources can focus on other aspects than the mundane tasks of building and deploying code that more or less remain the same throughout the project.

You can configure Visual Studio Code, where you create your code, to synchronize directly with a VSTS or GitHub repository. When you implement changes, add and remove files, and test your code, you can now always commit changes directly to either service.

The method for moving files back and forth between your local development environment, and your preferred repository service (VSTS, GitHub, or similar), is called Git. Git is a distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame). GitHub is a Git hosting service. This in itself is a version control system used to track changes to your projects, and the very same system can be used to push data from your local folders to a cloud-based versioning system.