I’ve used WinMerge for a while now and really enjoy it. It is definitely much better than the merge tool that ships as part of the TFS plugin for Visual Studio. Last week during one of my presentations, someone asked me how to change the default behavior in Visual Studio so that it uses your diff tool of choice. So here it is:
- Download WinMerge: http://winmerge.org/
- From Visual Studio go to Tools –> Options –> Source Control –> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
- Click on the “Configure User Tools” button
- Click on the “Add” button and enter the following values:
- Extension: .*
- Operation: Compare
- Command: C:\Program Files (x86)\WinMerge\WinMergeU.exe
- Arguments: /ub /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2
That’s it! From now on WinMerge (or whatever you configured) will come up when you do a file compare. There’s a great post from a few years back that shows you all the different settings if you are looking to use a different merge application: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmanning/archive/2006/02/20/diff-merge-configuration-in-team-foundation-common-command-and-argument-values.aspx