Is there any tool to see at a glance the changes of a TFS checkin (for review)

Question

I'm an architect doing reviews on the code checkins of many developers using TFS.

Currently, I have to use Source Control history to see individual checkins, then for each checkin I have a list of changed files, and I must double click each file to see its changes (if it was existing) or its contents (if it's new). This is time consuming and not very fun.

A better process would be, for a given checkin, to be able to see all changes in a single window, with just information lines telling me which file this change is in.

Another possibility would be to mark up the changed lines in VS directly and allow navigation between them.

Does anyone know of an existing tool that could help me with this side of TFS ? Or should I roll my own ? (sounds not too complicated with the TFS API, but I'd rather do my job than code tools :) )

Answer 1

I think you will need to create your one. You are right that this should be a pretty easy task using the API, but it could get to a pretty big change log with a lot to calculate!

If you look at the source for my "TFS Sticky Buddy" you will see API access in action, and taking that to the level you want ios trivial...

Answer 2

The following question might help you - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/74526/tfs-annotateblame-summary-report-for-a-project.

Answer 3

You can analyse changes using the TFS API down to the level of what files have changed, but to determine what content in a file has changed you need to use external tool/library. There is a comparison/merge tool that ships with Visual Studio Team Explorer but this is still an external tool that processes the changes at runtime. Just FYI.

Edit: I think I may be completely wrong!

Answer 4

Other than the Annotate suggestions I also suggest TeamReview to help cut down the time you are doing code reviews. Also, Attrice's Code Review Side Kick could help.

Latsly I would suggest that however you decided to do code reviews that your responses be sharable to more people than just the code author. Code reviews aren't just to benifit what has been written it's to shape what will be written as well. This should help cut down the amount of time you spend on code reviews.

Answer 5

That code review sidekick looks very interesting ... I'll have to look at it in deeper details. My google searches never turned that up, that company needs to work on its SEO. :)

Thanks a lot JB Brown for pointing it out to me.