Does anyone know of a code change management tool that can highlight code changes in Visual Studio?

Question

Hey all, I am trying to find a tool that can highlight code changes in Visual Studio so they can be easily found and reviewed. Below are some requirements for what we are looking for...

Identify and use a difference highlighting tool that meets the following criteria:

• can highlight areas that need to be reviewed

• there is a place to enter comments

• retains line numbering from code

• preference for doing within IDE

Issue addressed:

Hard to see what was changed in code - changes not identified. Coders do not provide administrators diffs. No tool that does a nice job to identify differences. Daunting/time consuming to provide a good diff. When highlighting differences was provided, loss of line numbers was a substantial issue (was worse).

Answer 1

A lot of source control systems offer this functionality.

Check out Subversion at

http://subversion.tigris.org/

There is visual studio integration at Visual Subversion:

http://www.visualsvn.com/

Answer 2

We use BeyondCompare for this. The 3 pane view for merge (original, theirs, yours) and the 2 panel pane for comparison like you want is excellent.

You can use it standalone, including just looking at file trees outside visual studio, or integrate inside and with most of the version control systems as well. Take a look here for the parameters. That example is for TFS, but you can change the command line to fir any version control.