I have been using Visual Studio Team System 2008 for a while now and am really starting to like the tightly integrated source control and work item functionality. One thing I cannot get used to is the basic diff/merge tool.
Where is the detail ?
The screenshot below demonstrates the basic nature of the diff tool built into Visual Studio Team System. There is no indication of the number of differences between the files being diff’ed or even the actual differences on a particular line …
WinMerge
There is an alternative and it is both open source and free ! From the WinMerge site:
WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.
Download WinMerge and install it.
Configure Visual Studio
Open Source Control > Visual Studio Team Foundation under the Tools > Options menu in Visual Studio.
Click on Configure User Tools … and the Configure User Tools dialog will become available.
Add the WinMerge details for the Compare Tool. Click on the Add … button on the Configure User Tools dialog and configure as per the screenshot below. The arrow button next to the arguments text box exposes details about the information that Visual Studio can provide the tool being configured.
The configured arguments below are:
/e /u /wl /wr /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2
Add the WinMerge details for the Merge Tool. Click on the Add … button on the Configure User Tools dialog and configure as per the screenshot below. The arrow button next to the arguments text box exposes details about the information that Visual Studio can provide the tool being configured.
The configured arguments below are:
/e /u /wl /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2 %4
The Compare and Merge Operations should now be configured to use WinMerge.
WinMerge Command Line Options
WinMerge contains a number of command line options. The following are the ones used in the configuration above.
| /e | Enables WinMerge to be closed with a single Esc key press. |
| /u | Prevents WinMerge from adding either the left or right hand side file path to the Most Recently Used (MRU) list. |
| /wl | Opens left hand side as read-only. |
| /wr | Opens right hand side as read-only. |
| /dl | Description for left hand side title bar. |
| /dr | Description for right hand side title bar. |
Finally a decent diff !
Now a Compare in Visual Studio is more meaningful, It shows the number of differences, their positions within the compared files and actual differences per line. WinMerge supports custom syntax colouring and diff colouring.
Brilliant stuff…just what the doctor ordered.Thanks!
With the risk of sounding incredibly lazy; it would be nice if the command line options you used were presented as selectable text.
I’m always willing to make the information in a post easier to use. I’ve updated the post to include the WinMerge arguments as selectable text.
Thank you so much for posting this. Really useful!
Thanks for sharing..
Was looking exactly for this ..
Thanks. WinMerge is such a better diff tool.
Many thanks!!!
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That’s just awesome, thanks a ton
Great. Very helpful. Thanks mate.
Wish I’d made the effort to set this up years ago, thanks for making it so smooth & easy for me.
This is great! Thanks a lot!
Me and my team mates echo everyone’s replies here. We are very thankful for this post. WinMerge is definitely a much superior tool than the one VS includes, and this post makes it very easy to integrate it in VS.
Thanks again.