Reputation: 1279

Do you know any file comparison add-in for visual studio

Is there any built-in, add-in solution for visual studio to compare two files and display result with differences? I could't find one...

Upvotes: 20

Answers (10)

Ofek Shilon

Reputation: 16129

Here is an excellent post that describes integration of many 3rd party diff and merge tools into Visual Studio - including araxis, beyond compare, WinMerge and many others. The post is badly needed, since the command-line parameters that VS can supply aren't fully documented.

Personally, I switched from the built-in tool to Araxis, and am generally happy with it. I am also curious about bazaar, which supposedly (according to the colorful author of its diff-component), "solves the diff problem"... Anyone has any experience with that?

Upvotes: 14

kroiz

Reputation: 1772

Once you add some version control plugin to visual studio, you can select the tool for diff.
Perforce are giving away their diff and merge tool for free, it is very good and you don't have to be using the perforce version control system to be using it. one can download it from their site; it is called p4merge. when running the installer you should only select the feature "Visual Merge Tool (P4Merge)" and unselect the other features which are only relevant if you are using perforce.

personally I use vim because it do syntax coloring (which I feel is very helpful especially when you do diff or merge) but it has a steep learning curve.

Upvotes: 0

Emmanuel

Reputation: 14209

In addition to djeidot's answer: beware if you're using Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Comparison Tools works very well with VS 2008, but does not under VS 2010...

Upvotes: 3

JackD

Reputation: 597

As for me, CodeCompare is a useful solution for your task. You can compare, merge and edit data within one environment - in the Visual Studio.

Upvotes: 4

djeidot

Reputation: 4642

I use WinMerge. Not as good as Beyond Compare but it's free and open source.

Also check out Visual Studio Comparison Tools, it's a Visual Studio add-in that connects it to WinMerge.

Upvotes: 18

Darren Stokes

Reputation: 92

SlickEdit Tools Versioning Toolbox has the same diff tool built in as the SlickEdit programmer's editor. The Versioning Toolbox is not free but isn't that expensive either. The diff tool is very nice.

Upvotes: 0

Christopher Edwards

Reputation: 6659

Depending on your use case I'd recommend VisualSVN. You'll get the source control feature of SVN built into the VS IDE plus the ability to compare any source code file with any checked in version file from SVN.

It installs all the prerequites for you SVN (Subversion), TortoiseSVN, Diff, AND VisualSVN (The Visual Studio Integration).

It also has a nice quick windows installer for the SVN server which worries about apache etc. so you don't have to.

Essential for the non linux geek, it it not free but at $49 it is a bargain,

http://www.visualsvn.com/

Upvotes: 0

Brody

Reputation: 2074

That functionality appears to be related to Source Control. So it is really as source control issue.

If you are not using Source Control - You should be - Try The Vault from www.sourcegear.com for a good (and free for one user) commercial source control system. There are others and they should come with a comparision tool (The Vault has one and its installed into VS when you install the vault client and connect to a source controlled project).

Upvotes: 1