Michael Banzon

At work we use a Subversion server to store, branch and merge all our code. Generally this works out great! The life quality of the programming staff has risen quite a few nods after introducing this. Even as a single developer I can only recommend it – the posibility of branching and merging whilst hopping back and forth between different revisions is great! Simply great!

Anyway – one thing that constantly annoys me is the lack of code knowledge by the merge tool. This means that often when two developers has been editing the same file and lines there is a conflict that the merge tool can’t solve properly. Often when files are merged the result can’t compile! This means more management – which means an unhappy developer. Me!

To the best of my knowledge the merge tool could do a much better job if it simply knew what it was merging. A merge tool re-written specifically for C# code would in my oppinion do a much better job in these special cases. I’m not even going to start on the subject of designer generated GUI code merging. We do our very best to avoid this – it is always a source of great failure!

I’ll conclude this rant by noting that my irritation obviously hasn’t peaked yet. If this was the case I would’ve put some effort into a solution.