My Geek Notes

I learned a few new things about the Javascript Date object today:

1. When using this constructor: new Date(year, month, day);, month is 0 based. So, if you want to create a date object for September 30, 2007, it would look like this: new Date(2007, 8, 30);
2. It’s far better to use a completely different constructor - one that takes a date string, parses it, and returns a valid date object. So like this: new Date('9/30/2007'); will generate September 30, 2007.

Recently, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) for source control. Both my last job and my current job use it and as a Microsoft developer, and so, whether I like it or not, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future; but that’s really beside the point. Microsoft’s diff / merge tool simply isn’t adequate. It highlights the differing line just fine, but it’s not smart enough to tell me what’s different.

Years ago, I started looking around for a good solution and found KDiff. It’s an open source project hosted on Source Forge. It’s a wonderful piece of software that does exactly what you’d expect it to do. It even tells you if the only difference on a given line is just spacing (which typically has zero impact on code execution).

I wanted it to integrate with TFS nicely without having to work around it and found the necessary command-line paramters to feed to TFS:

Compare:
%1 %2

Merge:
%1 %2 -o %4

So to make them work with TFS, open Visual Studio, go to Tools -> Options and under the Source Control -> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server tree, click “Configure User Tools. . .”. That’s where the magic happens.

That’s pretty much it. It makes dealing with different files, concurrent checkouts, and other issues related to development and source control so much better.