A neat little trick I discovered recently, and promptly forgot to share is that you can make use of Visual Studio’s diff window for any pair of files, without the need for a project or solution. All you need is a little command line trickery.
Hey reader!
After many years, I’ve finally decided to start moving off WordPress and onto a blog I host myself. This post is now available at “https://blog.jermdavis.dev/posts/2014/bonus-chatter-visual-studio-diff“. Eventually this version will be retired so please update links on any sites you control, to avoid 404s in the future.
For VS2012 you can type:
"%VS110COMNTOOLS%/../IDE/devenv.exe" /diff {fileOne} {fileTwo} {displayNameOne} {displayNameTwo}
(If you’re running VS2013, you can use the environment variable VS120COMNTOOLS instead)
Just replace {fileOne} and {fileTwo} with the absolute paths to the files you want to compare. You can optionally provide {displayNameOne} and {displayNameOne} as “friendly names” for the two diff panes.
And up pops a window like:
Could be useful for scripts and tools that need to display differences between files…
Jeremy Davis 