Question

I keep hitting brick walls trying to merge changes to the trunk with a branch.

A month or so ago, the trunk (5.0) was branched off (to 6.0). Since then, development has been done on the 6.0 branch, but hot-fixes have also been made to the trunk. I now want to update the 6.0.x branch with all the changes that have been made to the trunk since the 6.0 branch was formed off the 5.0 trunk a month or so ago.

Is there any way to do this without checking out both trunk (5.0.x) and branch (6.0.x) and using a 3rd party tool to reconcile differences?

Answer 1

You can easily do this using the Source Control Explorer. This is described in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181282(v=VS.90).aspx, scroll down to the section Merging Version Control Items.

1. In Source Control Explorer, right-click the 5.0 Trunk folder, and select Merge.
   In the Source Control Merge Wizard, in the Source Branch text box, the
   path and name for the 5.0 Trunk folder appears.

2. In the Target Branch drop-down list, select the 6.0 Branch folder.

3. In Select the source branch changes you want to merge, select All changes up to a specific version, and click Next.

4. In the Select the version of the source items step, in the Version Type drop-down list, select Latest Version, and click Next.

5. In the Perform the merge operation step, click Finish.

Since there are differences between the source and target branches,
the Resolve Conflicts dialog box appears. Follow the steps in the next
procedure to resolve the conflicts. If there are no conflicts, the
Resolve Version Conflict dialog box will not appear.