Merge enhancements in TFS 11

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Brian Harry MS — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:38:34 GMT

@Mark, In VS 2012, you can do it with options on the toolbar - including SxS vs inline, ignore whitespace. If you are asking about an older version of VS, let me know.

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Rory Primrose — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 04:36:10 GMT

@Mark, I'm not sure about whitespace, but you should be able to control side by side vs inline. You can easily integrate Visual Studio with a 3rd party tool if you don't get the functionality out of the built in merge/diff tool that you want.

See my post at www.neovolve.com/.../using-winmerge-with-tfs.aspx to set up your IDE to use WinMerge.

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Mark Freeman — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:25:29 GMT

How can I change options for the merge tool (ignore whitespace, inline vs. side by side, etc.)?

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Glenn Brown — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:36:08 GMT

This has been my biggest complaint about tfs 2011 and I hope these improvements become a reality. looking forward to the new release.

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Peter Ritchie — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:03:11 GMT

Really, there still isn't a way to ignore whitespace on merge?

That has to be my biggest blocker with TFS. To have conflicts show up when checking in and the diff tool showing no conflicts is the biggest pain point and source of check-in problems I've encountered with teams using TFS. I completely undermines any confidence in TFS merge/conflict-detection

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Sue Wolber — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:07:01 GMT

Hope the new GUI will also make it clear what choices are available when a file on the branch is _both_ renamed and content edited that requires a manual merge in the merge tool - VS2008 and VS2010 GUI's are very unclear as to what the various options are going to do for the rename and edit changes.

And hopefully multiple file / directory renames are still followed for merging (originally TFS 2010 had issues where it would only follow the first rename).

Merging on unshelving - HURRAH!

Great post - thanks!!

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Keith Hill — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 22:59:15 GMT

Unshelving into alternate locations (ie branches) would be nice to have in the GUI as well. BTW we had a problem with TFS 2010's "first class" branch feature that wouldn't allow us to branch a directory structure that contains a branch. We require this is our source code in order to share "common" files amongst multiple products. Anyway, we were able to work around that in TFS 2010 by demoting the branch to a regular folder. I hope we will still be able to do something similar with TFS 11.

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Kevin — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:47:42 GMT

This looks great. Does anyone know if there will be enhancements coming for merging of EDMX files?

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Christian Mogensen — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:28:26 GMT

We used ignore whitespace during merge quite heavily when working with Perforce.

P4Merge makes it a simple menu choice to select whether to respect whitespace, ignore all whitespace, or just line endings. Changing the menu selection refreshes the diff views, and the diff map makes it easy to see what is going on.

If you've added an if() block and indented a bunch of code, being able to easily see that you've only added two lines and not edited twenty is very handy.

Granted that yes - sometimes you end up with b0rked indents after a whitespace ignore merge, but that is usually easy to fix directly in the merge window.

re: Merge enhancements in TFS 11

Brian Harry MS — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:32:29 GMT

JonV, no we don't currently support "fast forward" merges. Fast forward merges take advatage of the fact that only one of the two branches being merged changed between the branch and the merge to avoid creating divergent history. There's nothing that would prevent us from doing that but we don't currently.

Brian