Great Tool for Merging

Though there are rumors we might be moving to Team Foundation Server soon, the cold reality is that my current project is Visual SourceSafe based.  Added to the mix is the fact I’m splitting my time to some bug fixing on an older version, and some new work on the current version.  The versions are branched under SourceSafe (which I have to admit, in v8 is a lot better than I remember it in back in the v6 days) and I’m stuck having to merge some bug fixes forward.  I was using the built-in merge tool in VSS, but managed to screw things up more than once.  A teammate forwarded a link to WinMerge to me, which is a god-send.  I know I’m only scratching the surface of it, but for merging across the two projects I’m on, my productivity has gone up.

One problem with VSS is comparing what files are out-of-sync in branches.  Basically I’d look at the history of a project, find the files that changed, try and print that history (and have to formatting render that report useless), then merge each one.  With WinMerge, I tell it to compare my two working directories, it tells me which files are different, I double click on the ones that are, use the super nice interface to move changes forward, and then when I save the merged file, since its read-only, it assumes it’s under source control and prompts me to check it out from VSS.  The integration could be better with VSS (I have to manually type the VSS project path), but I’m a whole lot more productive even with this little manual step.