How to ignore white space when comparing source in Visual Studio / TFS?

Question

The compare tool in Visual Source Safe (pre TFS) had a handy checkbox to select "Ignore White Space".

Now we are using TFS with Visual Studio 2010, and the compare dialog no longer has this option. (A ridiculous oversight from Microsoft!)

So, is it possible somehow to work around this?

Answer 1

This is a workaround that seems to get around the problem.

In Visual Studio, select Tools / Options / Source Control / Visual Studio Team Foundation System and click the Configure User Tools button.

In the dialog, Add an item with the following settings.

• Extension : .*
• Operation : Compare
• Command : C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\diffmerge.exe
• Arguments : %1 %2 %6 %7 %5 /ignorespace

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Edit:

Depending on your Visual Studio version and instalation path (x64/x86), the command option may be...

VS2010: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\diffmerge.exe
VS2012: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\diffmerge.exe
VS2013: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\vsDiffMerge.exe
VS2015: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\vsDiffMerge.exe
VS2017: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\vsDiffMerge.exe

In the argument option leave it with the same number of arguments as the VS suggests and just add /ignorespace in the end. For example, in the VS2015 it will be:

%1 %2 /ignorespace