Guys,
Is there a program or add-on to Visual Studio 2008 that will compare and show the differences in 2 solutions. I currently have 2 solutions, a "live" project and a new version of the project with some differences. I'd like a program that will compare the 2 solutions and show me the changes made.
The best windows tool available to compare files is Beyond Compare Its commercial but you can get a 30 day trial. There is a Linux version too.
Visual Studio project and solution files are text files underneath. Any diff tool should be able to show you the differences there.
If you need to compare whole project directories, Hidayath's suggestion of winmerge is is a good one. I especially like the linefilters feature, which you can use to exclude lines matching a pattern from the comparison. I've used this to compare two asp.net web projects where one was a web site and one was a web application, meaning that every page had a different class name; ignoring the @page lines in the aspx files allowed me to find which files had actually changed, and removed differences that didn't matter.