Developer Command Prompt for VS2013
During last week, a collegue had some issues with licensing of Visual Studio. Basically he couldn’t open visual studio anymore due to an expired license, and he was sure he had stuff checked out in his local environment.
How do you check this if you’re not able to open your solution? I’ve been a bit curious about the command prompt for visual studio and I’ve tried the diffmerge for older versions ( vsdiffmerge in vs2013 ) so maybe, just maybe we could bring some light on his checked out code.
To find the command prompt just search for “Visual Studio Tools” and then there should be a shortcut to the “Developer Command Prompt for VS2013”
The scenario is, person a can’t open visual studio but needs to get a rough view on what is different from the server.
tf folderdiff $/tfs\path\to\folder drive:\local\path\to\folder /recursive
This will bring up a prompt that will inform you if your local files are up to date or not!
In this case we can see that we have some differences, in the case of my collegue there were no differences and everything panned out.
I’m sure this can be done in some other smarter way, but it was a good excuse for me to try the command prompt.
We had another issue and that was to see what has changed between the release of two apps, well the command prompt once again to the rescue!
drive:\local\path\to\workspace>tf history . /recursive /version:D"2015-03-01"~D"2015-0 3-31" /noprompt /login:domain\username,password > drive:\output\path\filename.txt
This will export all the history for that folder between two dates and ouput them in a file. Pretty handy but in hindsight I must admit that some check-in comments are pretty strange like using the word “stuff”.
Using the command prompt is new to me but I must say that I like it a lot and I’m sure that it holds more gems!
