diffmerge - Developer IT

How do I view 'git diff' output with visual diff program?

- by padraigf

When I type 'git diff', I want to view the output with my visual diff tool of choice (SourceGear diffmerge on Windows). How do I configure git to do this?

.NET "must-have" development tools

James Avery wrote a classic article a while back entitled Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now which is a companion to Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now and Scott Hanselman has an excellent list on his blog but if you were on a desert island and were only allowed three .NET development tools which ones would you pick? Update: Assuming you already have an IDE like Visual Studio ... Update (5) : Up to 08/01 : The current state of play: Reflector 13 Resharper 9 NUnit + TestDriven.Net 7 Refactor Pro 4 Process Explorer (other Sysinternals) 3 SnippetCompiler 3 CodeRush 3 MSDN Library 2 LinqPad 2 Cruisecontrol.net 2 VMWare 2 RhinoMocks 2 Fiddler 2 PowerShell 2 PowerCommands for VS 2008 1 Sandcastle 1 SQL Profiler 1 Redgate ANTS profiler 11 NCover 1 VisualSVN 1 Rubber Ducky 1 WinMerge 1 NAnt 1 ViEmu 1 AnkhSVN 1 dotTrace Profiler 1 BeyondCompare 1 DPack VS Plugin 1 WCF Trace Viewer (SDK) 1 xUnit.net 1 SourceGear DiffMerge 1 Ghostdoc 1 Expression Studio 1 XAML Pad 1 KaXaml 1 Blender for 3D modeling 1 Snoop a WPF tool 1 DiffMerge 1 DPack 1 NDepend 1 Kodos 1 WatiN 1 HTTPWatch Basic Edition 1 Paint.Net 1 Mole For VS 1 What I find particularly interesting about this is that "NUnit + TestDriven.Net " is right up there in third place which shows the growing emphasis on testing as an integral part of the development process rather than as an adjunct which is simply bolted on. And I'm somewhat perplexed that Codesmith didn't receive a single vote?

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Why does the Git community seem to ignore side-by-side diffs

- by Kyle Heironimus

I used to use Windows, SVN, Tortoise SVN, and Beyond Compare. It was a great combination for doing code reviews. Now I use OSX and Git. I've managed to kludge together a bash script along with Gitx and DiffMerge to come up with a barely acceptable solution. I've muddled along with this setup, and similar ones, for over a year. I've also tried using the Github diff viewer and the Gitx diff viewer, so it's not like I've not given them a chance. There are so many smart people doing great stuff with Git. Why not the side-by-side diff with the option of seeing the entire file? With people who have used both, I've never heard of anyone that likes the single +/- view better, at least for more than a quick check.

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Best graphical source code diff viewer/editor for code comparison and merging?

- by Assaf Lavie

The options for source code diff viewing/editing/merging seem to be: Free: Tortoise Merge Meld * WinDiff WinMerge * DiffMerge * KDiff AJC Diff Commercial: Total Commander's Diff viewer * Beyond Compare * Delta Walker * Araxis Merge * Are there any other options? (Wikipedia suggests a few) What's your favorite tools for source code diff? And how does it differ from the ones in the list? * Supports directory diffs

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Unset core.editor in Msysgit

- by mathee

I set my editor per an SO entry: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/780425/how-do-i-setup-diffmerge-with-msysgit-gitk. I'm wondering how to undo this because I want to switch back to the default editing program.

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OpenXML error “file is corrupt and cannot be opened.”

- by nmgomes

From time to time I ear some people saying their new web application supports data export to Excel format. So far so good … but they don’t tell the all story … in fact almost all the times what is happening is they are exporting data to a Comma-Separated file or simply exporting GridView rendered HTML to an xls file. Ok … it works but it’s not something I would be proud of. So … yesterday I decided to take a look at the Office Open XML File Formats Specification (Microsoft Office 2007+ format) based on well-known technologies: ZIP and XML. I start by installing Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office and playing with some samples. Then I decided to try it on a more complex web application and the “file is corrupt and cannot be opened.” message start happening. Google show us that many people suffer from the same and it seems there are many reasons that can trigger this message. Some are related to the process itself, others with encodings or even styling. Well, none solved my problem and I had to dig … well not that much, I simply change the output file extension to zip and extract the zip content. Then I did the same to the output file from my first sample, compare both zip contents with SourceGear DiffMerge and found that my problem was Culture related. Yes, my complex application sets the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture to a non-English culture. For sample purposes I was simply using the ToString method to convert numbers and dates to a string representation but forgot that XML is culture invariant and thus using a decimal separator other than “.” will result in a deserialization problem. I solve the “file is corrupt and cannot be opened.” by using Convert.ToString(object, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) method instead of the ToString method. Hope this can help someone.

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Diff Algorithm

- by Daniel Magliola

I've been looking like crazy for an explanation of a diff algorithm that works and is efficient. The closest I got is this link to RFC 3284 (from several Eric Sink blog posts), which describes in perfectly understandable terms the data format in which the diff results are stored. However, it has no mention whatsoever as to how a program would reach these results while doing a diff. I'm trying to research this out of personal curiosity, because I'm sure there must be tradeoffs when implementing a diff algorithm, which are pretty clear sometimes when you look at diffs and wonder "why did the diff program chose this as a change instead of that?"... Does anyone know where I can find a description of an efficient algorithm that'd end up outputting VCDIFF? By the way, if you happen to find a description of the actual algorithm used by SourceGear's DiffMerge, that'd be even better. NOTE: longest common subsequence doesn't seem to be the algorithm used by VCDIFF, it looks like they're doing something smarter, given the data format they use. Thanks!

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C# string equality operator returns false, but I'm pretty sure it should be true... What?!

- by Daniel Schaffer

I'm trying to write a unit test for a piece of code that generates a large amount of text. I've run into an issue where the "expected" and "actual" strings appear to be equal, but Assert.AreEqual throws, and both the equality operator and Equals() return false. The result of GetHashCode() is different for both values as well. However, putting both strings into text files and comparing with DiffMerge tells me they're the same. Additionally, using Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes() on both values and then using SequenceEquals to compare the resulting byte arrays returns true. The values are 34KB each, so I'll hold off putting them here for now. Any ideas? I'm completely stumped.

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Software development stack 2012

A couple of months ago, I posted on Google+ about my evaluation period for a new software development stack in general. "Analysing existing 'jungle' of multiple applications and tools in various languages for clarification and future design decisions. Great fun and lots of headaches... #DevelopersLife" Surprisingly, there was response... ;-) - And this series of articles is initiated by this post. Thanks Olaf. The past few years... Well, after all my first choice of software development in the past was Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 - 9.0 in combination with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 2008 and Crystal Reports 9.x - XI. Honestly, it is my main working environment due to exisiting maintenance and support plans with my customers, but also for new project requests. And... hands on, it is still my first choice for data manipulation and migration options. But the earth is spinning, and as a software craftsman one has to be flexible with the choice of tools. In parallel to my knowledge and expertise in the above mentioned tools, I already started very early to get my hands dirty with the Microsoft .NET Framework. If I remember correctly, I started back in 2002/2003 with the first version ever. But this was more out of curiousity. During the years this kind of development got more serious and demanding, and I focused myself on interop and integrational libraries and applications. Mainly, to expose exisitng features of the .NET Framework to Visual FoxPro - I even had a session about that at the German Developer's Conference in Frankfurt. Observation of recent developments With the recent hype on Javascript and HTML5, especially for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development, I had several 'Deja vu' events... Back in early 2006 (roughly) I had a conversation on the future of Web and Desktop development with my former colleagues Golo Roden and Thomas Wilting about the underestimation of Javascript and its root as a prototype-based, dynamic, full-featured programming language. During this talk with them I took the Mozilla applications, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, as a reference which are mainly based on XML, CSS, Javascript and images - besides the core rendering engine. And that it is very simple to write your own extensions for the Gecko rendering engine. Looking at the Windows Vista Sidebar widgets, just underlines this kind of usage. So, yes the 'Modern UI' of Windows 8 based on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript didn't come as any surprise to me. Just allow me to ask why did it take so long for Microsoft to come up with this step? A new set of tools Ok, coming from web development in HTML 4, CSS and Javascript prior to Visual FoxPro, I am partly going back to that combination of technologies. What is the other part of the software development stack here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd? Frankly, it is easy and straight forward to describe: Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP 2 - still going strong! Visual Studio 2012 (C# on latest .NET Framework) MonoDevelop Telerik DevCraft Suite WPF ASP.NET MVC Windows 8 Kendo UI OpenAccess ORM Reporting JustCode CODE Framework by EPS Software MonoTouch and Mono for Android Subversion and additional tools for the daily routine: Notepad++, JustCode, SQL Compare, DiffMerge, VMware, etc. Following the principles of Clean Code Developer and the Agile Manifesto Actually, nothing special about this combination but rather a solid fundament to work with and create line of business applications for customers.Honestly, I am really interested in your choice of 'weapons' for software development, and hopefully there might be some nice conversations in the comment section. Over the next coming days/weeks I'm going to describe a little bit more in detail about the reasons for my decision. Articles will be added bit by bit here as reference, too. Please bear with me... Regards, JoKi

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Best Diff Tool?

- by ila

For all my present Diff / Merge needs I'm using Beyond Compare; when I decided to buy a license for it I tried other similar tools, both payware and freeware. Now BC is at version 3, and I think it's a great tool... but what are your experience in this field? Do you think there is something better? And what are the feature you like best on your favorite Diff tool? EDIT I'm recollecting here a list of the tools mentioned in the answers below, in order of preferences (more or less), separating pay- from free- ware and indicating supported operating system. Hope this helps. PAYWARE Beyond Compare (win + linux) - http://www.scootersoftware.com/ Araxis Merge (win + osX) - http://www.araxis.com/merge/index.html ExamDiff Pro (win) - http://www.prestosoft.com/edp_examdiffpro.asp ECMerge (win, osX, linux) - http://www.elliecomputing.com/Home/default.asp MergePlant (win) - http://www.mikado-ltd.com/ Changes (OSX) http://www.changesapp.com Deltopia DeltaWalker (win, osx, linux) http://www.deltopia.com/ FREEWARE FileMerge (OSX) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Developer_Tools#FileMerge Tortoise SVN (win) - http://tortoisesvn.net/ WinMerge (win) - http://winmerge.org/ ExamDiff (win) - http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff Diff Merge from SourceGear - http://www.sourcegear.com/diffmerge/index.html Perforce Merge (win + linux + OSX) - http://www.perforce.com/perforce/products/merge.html meld (linux) - sudo apt-get install meld http://meld.sourceforge.net/ Vimdiff - vim distribution KDiff3 - http://kdiff3.sf.net/ ediff - EMacs distribution Tiny Hexer Kompare (KDE, linux) - http://www.caffeinated.me.uk/kompare/ tkdiff (win, linux, osX) - http://tkdiff.sourceforge.net

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Tools of the Trade

- by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here! I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward. I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago. Let’s just say that things have improved. One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees. Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week. But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too. This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured. Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company. My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team. So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive. This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2. Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server. For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server. There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it. It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team. And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more. SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational. SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases. SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT. And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control. I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December. This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits. Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs. Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast. Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language. Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files). Provides in-context preview of the search results. Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files. It has language-specific syntax highlighting. I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems. Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace. Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs? SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls. We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon. Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs. Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids. Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance. Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool. SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge. For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases. This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system. The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups. Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing. I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for. We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager. But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design. The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow. I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync. I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them. FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard. Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps. I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68. Whew! That’s a lot. No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it. Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time. Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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