TFS Branch/Merge meets History View

Question

We have a setup with a development "trunk" in our recently-migrated-to-from-VSS TFS system and developers have been doing work in branches off the trunk, which are merged back in.

We've been diligently commenting our changesets at check in time, something we never did in the VSS days. However when I right-click on a trunk file in the Source Control Explorer and choose History, I only see monolithic changesets labeled "merge from dev branch" (or whatever the developer scribbled in there when they merged.) A history entry doesn't even seem to contain info on which branch was merged in at that time, let alone any info about the changesets that make it up, or the comments that go with them.

How have other TFS users dealt with this issue? Is there another way to view the history that I'm missing here? Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

This might be what you are looking for: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchHistory

Haven't used it personally, so I can't vouch for it.

Answer 2

Looking at the history of a change prior to the merge has been a bit of a pain point with TFS. So much so that Microsoft have done a lot of work to address this in the next version of TFS (TFS 2010). In TFS 2010 (when it comes out), when you get to a merge in the history view it is actually a little twistie that you can expand and go see the history for the thing that was merged which is much nicer.

In the meantime, when I see I big monolithic merge (or branch) comment I tend to let out a audible sigh and then go find the file in the branch it was merged from in Source Control Explorer and do a view history there.