Diff / Merge Tools and Dog Food

Since its release in 2005, the Altova marketing team has been actively using the DiffDog diff / merge tool to compare and merge changes on our Web pages (something Product Marketing Manager David McGahey likes to call “eating our own dog food.” Get it? Dog food? Anyway…). We create and edit our content directly in XML using the XMLSpy XML editor and use WinCVS as our version control client. This way, we [not-so-technical marketing folks] can easily view and revert changes to any files in our CVS repository. When we need to compare changes made in two versions of a given file, we simply highlight the versions and launch DiffDog directly from WinCVS. It’s a lightning-fast way to see exactly what has been changed. Our Web Development team also makes good use of DiffDog’s directory comparison functionality to diff and merge between our test and live Web servers.

Using DiffDog with Team Foundation Server

Jeff Levinson, Microsoft MVP and Application Lifecycle Management practice lead at Northwest Cadence, also recently shared his DiffDog story in an online article for Visual Studio Magazine, “Performing Comparisons with Team Foundation Server.” He details how you can replace the default merge tool in TFS with DiffDog. Do you have any stories to share about how you use our tools? Let us know!