Compare better in TFS with WinMerge

At my new job I’ve moved from Subversion to TFS for source control managing. Today I reacted over the fact that the compare algorithm in the built in compare tool is really bad. I had pretty much only removed some unnecessary try/catch blocks and that made the whole block of code look replaced/edited in the TFS compare view.

I was pleased to google out that the wonderful WinMerge application can be used as a compare tool and decided instantly to do the necessary setting. Now I got a much better compare view where I could see what actually changed.

For best change comparison in WinMerge I prefer to make sure the following options are checked:

And if you’re using the merge features of WinMerge and are certain about what you do I would deactivate the creation of backup files by unchecking “Folder compare” and “File compare” on the “Backup files” page of the WinMerge options dialogue. That way you wont end up with a lot of ugly .bak files all over the place.

What Compare/Merge tool do you like?

EPiServer backend interface only partially loaded in Internet Explorer

Long time no see! Since last time I’ve switched employer and I’m currently in over my head learning about all the wonders that is the EPiServer CMS system as an employee at Knowit.

Today I was setting up the Tech Alloy sample site using the EPiServer Deployment Center and once I got it running, created a user and logged in I could not access the right click EPiServer context menu and when browsing to the backend I got this weird look:

It was as if some client side errors caused the interface not to load correctly… After some clicking around I asked my colleague Kim and it turns out that in Windows Server environments there is something called Internet Explorer Enhanced Security (IE ESC) enabled by default which disables a lot of javascript stuff in IE (I’m running in a VM with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64). So he pointed me to Server Manager –> Configure IE ESC where I could turn this off:

Et voila, now the backend user interface works: