Finding merge candidates in TFS

Question

I have two branches for my code. Lets say B1 and B2. Code changes happen on both the branches parallely and we do a periodic merges (not everything

Answer 1

Doing the manually merge contrary the principle of source control to a certain extent. Strongly recommend you use tf merge command or the Source Control Merge Wizard through VS to achieve the merge. You can merge a changeset version, date version, label version, even a workspace version. If you had used the command, everything will be very easy. The simplest solution just as you mentioned, use tfs merge /candidates which will prints a list of all changesets in the source that have not yet been merged into the destination. You just need to check if you had merge all the necessary things to Branch2.

If you insist on the manually merge, the only possible method to remove the false positives is comparing files, folders or branch after the merge. You can use the Compare folders in VS or quick compare(just click mouse twice) with this extension TFS Productivity Pack (Visual Studio 2015)