How are Git repositories hosted by Microsoft protected from Microsoft employees peeking at other companies code? Is there some sort of protection in case of breach or if Microsoft launches a competitor to a service whose source code is in VSTS?

That is a good question to ask, certainly any time you put data into the cloud, you are trusting a 3rd party. In this case, we here at Microsoft take security and data privacy very very seriously.

Actually we even published a whitepaper on this topic, see:

Visual Studio Team Services Data Protection Overview https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/articles/team-services-se...

I hope that helps.

Couldn't you ask that question of literally any company hosting source. Or really, any cloud storage company at all?

This is where you talk about track record.

Previous story somewhat tangentially related because Microsoft.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...

> Although our terms of service, like those of others in our industry, allowed us to access lawfully the account in this case, the circumstances raised legitimate questions about the privacy interests of our customers.

> While our own search was clearly within our legal rights,

I love C# and I love visual studio but I think vsts needs to at least meet gitlab with a free and open source community edition for me to consider it again.

Hey, stop laughing. Stranger things have happened...

Not really, for example GitHub features mostly relate to bug tracking, etc, whereas MS offering is much broader - they just announced an invoicing product which could kill most invoicing-related SaaS apps out there.