Compare files with Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2015 file comparison tool can be considered good enough for most of the use cases. Before learning how to compare files with Visual Studio, I used to use WinMerge, or another tool to compare. Not anymore of that!

What is still missing in the IDE is a small menu that allows us to select 2 files and compare them. From command line, you can do it with devenv.exe /diff which compares two files. It takes four parameters:
SourceFile, TargetFile, SourceDisplayName(optional), TargetDisplayName(optional)

You can launch it with below command:

devenv.exe /diff “e:\source.txt” “e:\target.txt” “SOURCE” “TARGET”

But within the IDE, things change a little. Instead of launching the command from the Command Prompt, we can do it from the command window with a syntax of style

Tools.DiffFiles SourceFile, TargetFile

which makes it more easy to use.

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