Chris Rathjen

wake up dood. people don't spend thousands on an IDE to learn how to use a command line. ;)

Couple that with the fact that the builds are 'sketchy', hard to install, require alot of resources and at this point in time you're only talking to a handful of people who care (I care).

Those of us who are maverick enough to get far enough into it to actually use the source control are also typically the people maverick enough to figure it out.

If you want my advice start taking screen shots from the IDE or even recording the activity and posting movies.

Fair enough. I'll do some (or all) of the same merging using the Merge Wizard in the IDE, and post that (with screenshots, I promise!).

Use a catchy title next time. Something like "Free beer to the first commenter" Seriously... with the number of posts on the main feed, I just glance over the titles. If I find a title that strikes me, then I read the post.

harsh comments.

I've bookmarked your article for future reference - I know the need will be there - I just don't have it now.

keep up the good posts.

Oh, I remember seeing this, but deleted it, both your post and Bucks post referenced in the article no where did they ever tell me what the merge command was, what it is used for, why would I want to look at the examples. So I promply deleted it much like the exchange blogs I do not read those. Exchange is not something I work with so I generally just ignore the post from them and delete them, no offence to the exchange guys just not my thing. So whats the Merge command for?

Rob:
I was mentally prepared for harsh - that's why I put possibilities like "just plain boring" in the post. I'm more interested in posting helpful / useful / interesting material than in gathering Kudos (I play PGR2 for that!).

Jeff,
Merging is the "other half" of branching. So, what's branching? Branching is where you make a special copy of a file (or more, often, a tree of files) so you can work on one set without affecting the other set.

The typical reasons you'd do this are to 'fork' for a release or a Beta, or perhaps you have branches of common code that you modify differently for each of two or more customers. Or a developer branches part of the codebase so he can test his changes before checking them into the 'main' branch and affecting everyone else's source code.

"Merge" is the verb that describes moving changes between branches once they're created (though you can branch with the merge command as well - just merge to a target that doesn't exist yet).

And if that sort of thing doesn't cross your path, that's fine - any product will have a set of popular features and some that have decidedly fewer users. Merge is one of those commands that many users will be affected by, but won't necessarily use themselves.

In MS (and other places I've worked and/or observed), there's usually a person or team responsible for managing branches and merging changes between them, leaving the developers and testers and such (mostly) free to keep on trucking. And as anyone who's had that solemn duty will tell you, it's no picnic!

Jeff: You also might check out the first two sections of a post Buck wrote on the Team Foundation Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/archive/2005/02/23/379179.aspx). The first two sections give an overview of branching and merging.

^^^ (Talk about a goofy looking comment...) ^^^