About a year ago I finally got tired of the Diff tool that comes with Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS). A little Googling pulled up this Coding Horror post on Araxis Merge.
After a quick download and 30 day free trial, I was hooked. It is sooooooo sweet, and if you've never used anything better than the dumb VSS Diff, you don't know what you're missing. Then the 30 days came to an end.
Cheap, it is not. But hey, I rationalized: I'm a developer, and a good Diff tool is essential for the toolbox. I found that I was easy to convince. So, I bought it for myself with my own Buckazoids (more on those here, if you're interested). Since then have used it nearly every day, and it makes doing a diff nearly enjoyable. It was well worth the cost, and I only wish I had found it years earlier.
But then I changed jobs, and joined a place where Rational ClearCase is used. The ClearCase Diff tool was better than VSS' tool, but I preferred to stick with my beloved Araxis Merge. How to integrate it with ClearCase?
Fortunately Araxis had a page devoted to this topic, and an entry for ClearCase. This led me to Ganesh Viswanathan's nifty Clearaxis utility. A quick download and Presto, I was back in business with Merge.
After a few days of use, I noticed a little problem with Clearaxis: files in paths with embedded spaces would not load into Merge properly. I sent an email to Ganesh, and within a few days, he had provided me with a fix to try out, and it worked like a charm. Now that's terrific support. If you use ClearCase and Araxis Merge, you need Clearaxis!
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