Force a merge in TFS after conflicts have been resolved

Question

TFS 2010, VS 2010

We have a situation in TFS where a developer has not been following proper merge procedure. When I run a compare of his developer directory against trunk, I get a number of files marked as either different or not in trunk at all. The last merge/check-in to trunk was by him on 2011-05-26, and his last check-in to his dev branch was 2011-05-25.

I believe two things are going on:

1. He isn't updating his dev branch from trunk properly (we require developers to merge trunk -> dev branch and compile before merging dev -> trunk)

2. He isn't resolving merge conflicts correctly

The problem is that once he's marked conflicts as resolved, subsequent merges ignore those differences. I need to force a merge that revisits the differences from the whole file so that I can manually update every change he's made.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You need to go to the command line and use tf merge /force e.g. tf merge $/TeamProject/DevBranch $/TeamProject/Trunk /force This should do what you want.

for more info try tf msdn which will open a browser and take you to the online help for the tf command tools.

/recursive fixes all and displays the GUI for conflicts.

Answer 2

I found your answer and comments most helpful. I wanted to add that I needed to remove the /preview option to finally open the conflict resolution UI.

tf merge /recursive /force /version:C5367 "$/Source" "$/Target"