TFS Branch/Merge meets History View

14
votes

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?

3
tfsmergebranch
Kiquenet, in the 5 years since I asked this question we've moved from TFS2008 to the two or three new versions that have come out since. The branch history plugin proposed by ryan.rousseau did the trick at first, but the feature has long since been added to visual studio's TFS tooling. – James Orr

3 Answers

10
votes

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.

6
votes

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.

5
votes

Visit "TFS Branched History" plugin page at Microsoft Gallery:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/7d4f37b6-f9a4-44c6-b0a0-994956538a44

Plugin does insert "Branched History" button into the context menu of Source Control Explorer (TFS)

The button icon is with clock like standard "History" but with blue arrow:

Branched History Button

If you click "Branched History", new window will be opened and Path property will be set to the current Source Control Explorer path:

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Click "Run query" to get results at the "History" tab:

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From context menu you can query standard Changeset Details and Compare File (Folder) dialogs.