The trend for an "Opt-out"-style philosophy for source control

The old "Opt-in"-style for source control

I remember, when using Microsoft's Team Foundation System and Visual Studio, you'd have two ways to add a file to source control:

• either Visual Studio would take care of that for you when your file was part of a Solution
• or you would have to manually browse the "Source Control Explorer" and add you new files

Things have changed

As far as source control goes, everybody is moving to "opt-out"-style policies, instead of "opt-in"-style ones, ( get used to it :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:  , 'cause it's actually much safer and nicer in the long run... even if there is an "up-front" price to pay -- ie. setting up your ".ignore" file)

Now, everything is under source control by default, unless you specify otherwise. This is nice because you typically don't get things happening behind your back without you knowing or forgetting (files added, changed or deleted).

Configuring what is ignored

When using the Git version control system, the critical files for specifying what is not meant to be kept under source control are the famous ".gitignore" files.

Visual Studio and Team Foundation System have a very similar concept, except the file is called ".tfignore".