Branching and Track Changes Visualization in TFS 2010 is Awesome

I’m up early working on a problem that’s been nagging me and just had to stop for a second to show how friggin’ awesome the new Branching & Track Changes visualization tools in TFS 2010 are. This is on a demo TFS 2010 environment but I wanted to use the APIs to find out information about what changesets were included in a merged changeset. I needed to find a good candidate that allowed me to follow some changes throughout the branches. I quickly found changeset 103 in my MAIN branch which included several (but not too many) individual changesets that were included with it. I went ahead and tracked that changeset and got the following diagram below.

However, I noticed that I ended up having some kind of partial merge as indicated in the Feature A branch with changeset 78 (as indicated by the yellow shading on the track changes visualization.) That got me curious… What happened there? It was pretty easy to figure out because all I had to do is change to the “Timeline View” instead of the “Hierarchy View” that I was currently in and I ended up receiving the visualization below which shed some light on things.

The reason the Feature A branch was indicated as a partial merge was because not all of the changes that are included in changeset 103 (which is the changeset we’re pivoting off of for visualizations) has been merged into that branch. It only contains changesets 76 & 77 but not 101 & 102. Pretty handy!

Ed Blankenship