Question

CONTEXT: I am preparing a big C# merge using visual studio 2008 and TFS. I need to create a report with the files and the number of collisions (total changes and conflicts) for each file (and in total of course)

PROBLEM: I cannot do it for two reasons (first one is solved):

1- Using TFS merge I can have access to the file comparison but I cannot export the list of conflicting files… I can only try to resolve the conflicts.
(I have solved problem 1 using beyond compare. It allows me to export the file list)

2- Using TFS merge I can only access manually for each file to get the number of conflicts… but I have more than 800 files (and probably will have to repeat it in the close future so is not an option doing it manually)

There are dozens of file comparison tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools ) but I am not sure which one could (if any) give me these metrics. I have also read several forums and questions here but are more general questions (which diff tool is better) and I am looking for a very specific report.

So my questions are:

1. Is Visual Studio 2010 (using
   still TFS2008) capable of doing such
   reports/exportation?
2. Is there any
   tool that provide this kind of
   metrics (Now I am trying Beyond Compare)

Answer 1

Answer to my question after several days investigating:

1- Visual Studio 2008 & TFS 2008 cannot export any information.

2- After trying several tools:
BeyondCompare 3 allows getting metrics from IU and easily export them. (Used File Compare Report/XML Dump filtering files instead of using Folder Compare Report.)
KDiff3 allow getting some metrics using IU, but is not possible to export them.

Did not tried command line approach

NOTE: be aware that different tools have different conflict resolutions so metrics will be not 100% accurate. For example a file with 20 changes and 3 conflicts in TFS was reported as 20 changes 8 conflicts using beyond compare.