How can I force a manual merge in source control explorer TFS 2012?

Question

I have a set of branches off of main. One branch was created after main was rolled back another was created before this. Now upon trying to merge the two branches Source control is automatically overwriting all changes. How can I force it to allow me to manual compare and merge changes?

Answer 1

I prefer using tf.exe for forcing a merge:

tf.exe merge $/project/main/myfile.cs $/project/branch1/myfile.cs /force /v:t

this will force a merge of the file to the newest workspace even if tfs thinks all changesets have been merged.

you can also do a recursive merge to merge a folder/project

tf.exe merge $/project/main/consoleapplication1/views/ $/project/branch1/consoleapplication1/views/ /r /force /v:t

Answer 2

In Visual Studio go to Tools --> Options and uncheck "Attempt to automatically resolve conflicts when they are generated" marked in red in the image.