fooberry

Sweetness without context.

Replacing TFS Diff Tool

October 24th 2008

The TFS diff tool is horrible. It a pretty bare minimum difference between the two versions. The UI is basic.

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Nice huh? This line changed, but youre on your own to know what characters actually changed. While tooling around in the Visual Studio Options dialog I can across the settings that would let me change the diff and merge tools.Check out Tools | Options | Source Control | Visual Studio Team Foundation | Configure User Tools

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I needed a another diff tool, so I downloaded a trial of Beyond Compare and plugged it in there and it worked great! Except, in 15 days it wouldnt be working so great unless I could convince someone to shell out the $X to get us past the trial. After pinging some of my buddies about what diff tools they use, I decided to try the diff tool in TortoiseSVN. I installed it and added TortoiseMerge to the dialog.

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Ran my compare again and Bang! A new diff dialog appears that is much better than before.

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That is still a lot of redundant clutter for me, so switching views helps a little with that.

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We no longer get the detail about what changed on a line, but it is so much easier to manually identify when the rows overlap, Im not missing it.

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