Make sure to share any ideas and bugs on the GitHub issue tracker, and feel free to send pull requests too. If this feature is interesting to you, please install the File Differ extension and take it for a ride. By right-clicking inside the code editor, you’ll get the following options for diffing: There are also commands specific to the code editor. If there is text content on the clipboard, you can compare a file with it by selecting File with Clipboard from the context menu. If you only selected a single file, a file selector prompt will show up to let you select which file on disk to diff against. Then select Selected Files to see them side-by-side in the diff view. Select two files in Solution Explorer and right-click to bring up the context menu.

Compare file with its unmodified version.

Compare file with another file on disks.

Here’s are the commands available from the right-click menu in Solution Explorer: We call it File Differ and the first iteration adds basic file diffing capabilities. We’re starting out with an extension to kick off the experiment.

So, with increased interest and multiple viable solutions, what would the right implementation look like for Visual Studio users? They all perform basic comparison between files rather well, and we think it’s time we figured out how to design this feature for Visual Studio.Ī feature request on the Visual Studio Developer Community is also now gaining steam asking for file comparison, so please vote and comment if you agree. An interesting thing about the various implementations is that they offer slightly different features and with different UI paradigms. Various editors and IDEs offer this feature today, but Visual Studio has required the use of extensions such as VS Diff to provide the feature.

There is no straightforward way in Visual Studio to do those things today, but in this month’s experiment we’re going to change that. And again, sometimes comparing our local changes to previous versions from our Git commit history. Sometimes, even comparing the content of the clipboard with a file on disk. As developers, we often need to compare two files to find the differences.

Visual studio 2017 professional