Hey all, I am trying to find a tool that can highlight code changes in Visual Studio so they can be easily found and reviewed. Below are some requirements for what we are looking for...
Identify and use a difference highlighting tool that meets the following criteria:
• can highlight areas that need to be reviewed
• there is a place to enter comments
• retains line numbering from code
• preference for doing within IDE
Issue addressed:
Hard to see what was changed in code - changes not identified. Coders do not provide administrators diffs. No tool that does a nice job to identify differences. Daunting/time consuming to provide a good diff. When highlighting differences was provided, loss of line numbers was a substantial issue (was worse).
A lot of source control systems offer this functionality.
Check out Subversion at
http://subversion.tigris.org/
There is visual studio integration at Visual Subversion:
http://www.visualsvn.com/
We use BeyondCompare for this. The 3 pane view for merge (original, theirs, yours) and the 2 panel pane for comparison like you want is excellent.
You can use it standalone, including just looking at file trees outside visual studio, or integrate inside and with most of the version control systems as well. Take a look here for the parameters. That example is for TFS, but you can change the command line to fir any version control.
Related
I need a tool that would allow developers to format code using Visual Studio and also check if this formatting was applied from command line (for using in pre commit hook, CI builds, etc.) I am totally fine with default VS formatting or ReSharper formatting or any other sane default, but I need support from both VS and command line for the same style. Right now some developers use ReSharper, some use plain VS and 10s of lines of code get moved right or left with every commit with no actual change whatsoever.
I once heard about on a conference, but did not use it myself, because I usually do solo. Take a look at StyleCop
To preface this I am an Emacs refugee on Visual Studio 2010's shores and am certain that I am working against the tool. Please could someone point me in the right direction. My problem is the MyProject.csproj file is kept under version control using TFS and my coworkers have made a number of changes that no longer get along with my version. Not a problem, I can just merge the changes and make things right. But I can't, or rather I don't know how to. The compare tool in VS only taunts me, it won't let me pick and choose differences like I need to.
What I would love to do is just use Merge in Emacs, run through the file hitting L(eft), R(ight), B(oth) and be done with it in no time. What I don't understand is why there are certain changes that are accepted by default, that I cannot alter. I think that what it is doing is identifying changes that I made to the ancestor document and forcing those to be made while providing me the option of merging the changes from my coworkers. My issue is that these things are contradictory and I would like to ignore my change to Line 12 while accepting the Repository's Line 42 but applying my Line 106.
But I cannot figure out how to tell it "no" to Line 12.
This has to be common, what does one do in VS to get this to work?
Thanks!
The standard diff tool that comes with Visual Studio ... blows. Its not intuitive and doesn't work all that well.
But its very easy to integrate different diff tools. I'm using this one:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dace3633-0b51-4629-85d4-c59cdce5bb3b?SRC=VSIDE
(no affiliation; its free so don't ding me for spam kthx). Works pretty damn good. You might find one out there better suited for your tastes, in which case you can integrate it into visual studio. (again, not associated with me!)
I advise you to use WinMerge to compare or merge files with VS
You can define as Will said.
I am new to using Microsoft development tools but have been using Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4 and C# for the past few weeks. I ran into a problem yesterday creating a new project the same way I have been doing it successfully from the start: right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer → Add Reference, which used to bring up this dialog:
Old Dialog Box http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/8978/oldaddreferencedialogue.jpg
After a couple of weeks of no new projects I went to create one yesterday and got a new Add Reference dialog. And trying to add the same dll I have been adding for weeks now resulted in the error seen here:
New Dialog http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/2074/newaddreferencedialogue.png
So, after a painful day trying to determine the cause, it looks to me like it has something to do with the new dialog choking on the # I had in my reference path. When I removed the # everything works as expected. Considering Microsoft has two .NET languages with # in the name, I am surprised that this issue keeps biting people (I have heard of this problem over the years, but I have never done much with Microsoft tools until recently, so of course I did not recall it.)
Questions from a Visual Studio newbie:
Is it common knowledge to not use # in paths?
How/why did I get this new Add Reference dialog when my colleagues, using the same VS version, still have the old dialog that handles # in paths just fine?
My opinion is that if you use weird characters in paths, you get what you deserve. :)
I know there are bugs about '#' character in paths in the core VS product, in addition to whatever may be in the Pro Power Tools extension. There is a surprising amount of code that goes to/from URIs and filenames, and '#' characters (and everything thereafter) get dropped when roundtripping via a System.Uri.
In general, I think it's safe to assume that when creating filenames/paths, there will be 10,000 tools of various quality trying to parse the filenames, and a (large) subset of those tools will fail on 'weird' characters. Just avoid weird characters whenever possible. You gotta choose your battles. In an ideal world, tools would be robust to these kinds of issues. In the real world, it's better to name a path "CSharp" rather than "C#" and move on with more important things in life.
The second dialog is the one from the VS2010 productivity power tools pack - I havent used it myself so dont know of any problems with it. Have you recently installed this?
Forgive me, but I don't know the technical term to know what to search for.
I am trying to find a way to keep track of changes in my code during the development of my program. something that would allow me to go back to a section of code that I deleted. I am not talking about "undo". But rather a way that would let me keep track or be able to retrieve a section of my code that I deleted but now want it back.
Is there such a way? If there is, then what is this whole system/procedure called? Is there something that integrates with Visual Studio 2010?
you could use
SVN
or
GIT
but for local use, I would prefer SVN. its free and its easy.
For visual studio there are a few SVN client plugins (like VisualSVN). But, I would suggest TortoiseSVN as the client.
To be clear, SVN is the server, TortoiseSVN is the client. (Both are free open source tools)
It's called Revision Control.
The term you are looking for is Source Control. Modern source control's provide all the functionality you described plus much more.
Team Foundation Server seamlessly integrates into VS2010 and is very useful. Read through Source Control for Visual Studio to get up to speed.
I'm not familiar with Visual Studio, but generally there are two approaches to implementing this:
1) Source/Revision control - But the problem is that it is very low-granularity, you usually commit a file when it is ready, but lose any interim changes. There are a lot of solutions compatible with visual studio.
2) A local history that tracks multiple versions between commits. Eclipse has this built in, not sure how to access it in VS.
3) A very granular log of all your development activities so you can examine and revert past changes. Not familiar with a commercial version of this. I once developed something like this for Eclipse.
Please read this thread here at SO: Keeping track of changes I make by copying project folders.
subversion has a lot of mind share these days, but it's very old-school, first-gen tech. Distributed revision control is gaining a lot of momentum and I'd highly recommend that you become familiar with it if you're going to be a code monkey professional. Look up mercurial (also referred to as hg) or bazaar. If nothing else, perforce - a professional, commercial revision control tool - is free for up to two users. It works very well, as long as you keep your branching craziness to a minimum.
Every source control does that, you know ;)
YOu have a legal VIsual Studio 2010? Try Team System.
In Team Foundation Server, I know that you can use the Annotate feature to see who last edited each line in a particular file (equivalent to "Blame" in CVS). What I'd like to do is akin to running Annotate on every file in a project, and get a summary report of all the developers who have edited a file in the project, and how many lines of code they currently "own" in that project.
Aside from systematically running Annotate of each file, I can't see a way to do this. Any ideas that would make this process faster?
PS - I'm doing to this to see how much of a consultant's code still remains in a particular (rather large) project, not to keep tabs on my developers, in case you're worried about my motivation :)
It's easy enough to use the "tf.exe history" command recursively across a directory of files in TFS. This will tell you who changed what files.
However what you're after is a little bit more than this - you want to know if the latest versions of any files have lines written by a particular user.
The Team Foundation Power Tools ship with a command-line version of annotate called "tfpt.exe annotate". This has a /noprompt option to direct the output to the console, but it only outputs the changeset id - not the user name.
You could also use the TFS VersionControl object model to write a tool that does exactly what you need.
If you install the TFS Power tools (at least for VS2005); it's called annotate.
It might be part of VS2008...
You can use TFS Analysis Cube to see generate a code churn report, which I believe is something you would like.
Annotate is now part of Visual Studio (I think it was introduced in VS 2010).
Docs
I'm writing an answer to an 8 year old question :). Its not really a full answer, but a suggestion to look into excel reports for TFS.
TFS2013 / 2015 on prem has something has an excel report that can be used to visualize Code Churn.
In VS open team explorer then select "Documents" then explode "Excel Reports". I believe Code Churn report has something like discussed. The report is made by some default project template so I think tfs2013 on prem just creates it.
Code Churn Excel Report VS2015
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd695782.aspx
I had very similar requirement to get details of particular attribute in a file e.g. who added, when, related work items etc.; Following GitHub project is having implementation to get required details and required minimal changes to work with multiple files or project -
SonarQube SCM TFVC plugin
It requires analysis to be executed from Windows machines with the Team Foundation Server Object Model installed (download for TFS 2013).
This blog post is also having good explaination and sample application -
TFS SDK: Connecting to TFS 2010 & TFS 2012 Programmatically