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

Question

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...

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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?

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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...

Answer 5

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition has a built in version (based on WinDiff?) but you can incorporate third party tools e.g.

Beyond Compare which I regularly use.

See here for how-to.

Answer 6

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).