Creating a Patch with TFS

Question

Creating a patch is very easy in SubVersion, With Tortoise, you right-click and select Create Patch. But for the life of me, I can't find this functionality in TFS. Is this possible?

If not, what's the standard way to submit patches in open source TFS hosted projects (a la CodePlex)?

score 56 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 01 '12 at 22:20

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tf diff /shelveset:shelveset /format:unified

Edit: This writes to standard output. You can pipe the output to a file.

For more options, see Difference Command.

edited Aug 01 '12 at 22:20

Ilya

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answered Sep 09 '08 at 16:03

Curt Hagenlocher

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Can you explain a bit more? 1. How would you apply this patch? 2. Also, if the project is read-only to the patcher, he can't create a shelveset, can he? – Doron Yaacoby Jan 12 '10 at 14:01
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There's a standard UNIX program called "patch" that applies unified diffs to source trees. I'm sure you could find a Windows implementation, or you could use Cygwin. – Curt Hagenlocher Jan 31 '10 at 17:56
@Doron this displays all differences between the shelveset and the current workspace folder in a format similar to: http://hg.shrinkrays.net/spruce/changeset/0d00e3c15e2c/raw/spruce-0d00e3c15e2c.diff – Chris S Jan 27 '11 at 14:47
How do you pipe `|` to a file? I thought you had to redirect `>` to a file. – JJS Jun 06 '14 at 02:31
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If you haven't done this before: In the Start menu, drill down to Visual Studio, Tools, Command Prompt. Then cd to a folder somewhere in the local tree of the workspace, e.g. c:\build\myProject\src – Spike0xff Jul 07 '14 at 20:07

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 07:30

Because TFS doesn't natively support patch files, the most common thing I see people do on CodePlex is simply zip the modified files and upload the zip. The project coordinator then does a diff against their own checkout.

However since CodePlex also supports TortoiseSVN, more and more people are using that to create their patch files.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 14 '14 at 18:37

I wrote a blog post about a similar issue where I used the TF.exe command and 7Zip to create a TFS patch file that could then be applied on another TFS server or workspace. I posted the the Powershell scripts at Github, which can be used to Zip up any pending changes on one workspace and then apply them to a different server. It would have to be modified to use a changeset instead of pending changes, but that shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish.

This script uses the whole file, not the diffed lines. More of a controlled xcopy — JJS, Nov 03 '15 at 14:44

Creating a Patch with TFS

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