Git equivalent for TFS (TFVC) Compare with Workspace Version in Visual Studio

Question

When there are incoming commits (fetch), how do I manually review and manually merge each and every change using a diff GUI from "Incoming Commit" to LOCAL code in order to understand exactly how the branch is changing and to resolve both merge conflicts and logical conflicts BEFORE attempting to pull (fetch + merge) or merge?

A TFS (TFVC) equivalent is "Compare with Workspace Version" After drilling down into history and change sets.

With git in VS I only get compare with previous and I need to compare to local at the very least, if not whatever I want.

Notes: I'm using Git as implemented in Visual Studio 2015 (Version 14.0.25123.00 Update 2). I welcome answers that connect or map the concepts terminology and coder practices between TFS and Git instead of just, git doesn't work that way ect.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

TFS has two version control systems by default. They are Git and TFVC.

Git is a distributed version control system. Each developer has a copy of the source repository on their dev machine. Developers can commit each set of changes on their dev machine and perform version control operations such as history and compare without a network connection. Branches are lightweight.

Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) is a centralized version control system. Typically, team members have only one version of each file on their dev machines. Historical data is maintained only on the server. Branches are path-based and created on the server.

As Git is designed for many different branches and getting them back into main repo, you can only compare between commits or branches.

For your scenario, you need to go to TFS web access, and compare between branches to see which commits exist on which branches.