Is it possible to disable the auto-merge option in Visual Studio Team System 2008? If so how?

Question

I'd like to disable the automatic merge feature when checking in a file to TFS that another developer has worked on so that I always need to merge manually. Is there any way to do this?

Solution 1

The short answer as of Visual Studio 2008 seems to be no.

Solution 2

Try do the following (working in all Visual Studio versions from 2012-onwards):

Tools -> Options -> Source Control -> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server -> Uncheck "Attempt to automatically resolve conflicts when they are generated":

Comments

[Bryan Anderson]

I don't want to take away the merge capability. I just want to turn off the automatic merge "feature" because it tends to do so terribly. Basically I want it so I will always do a manual merge.

[Bryan Anderson]

I already have it set up to do manual merges in Winmerge which makes manual merges nearly painless.

[Jason Williams]

Ah. In that case, apologies for not being very helpful. I'm afraid I share your complaint (the number of dialogs you have to work through to round-trip the merge between VSTS and the merge tool is so frustrating, tedious and time-wasting! As soon as I get some free time, I think I'll just write a replacement front-end for TFS, 'cos the MS one (to use the technical term) truly sucks)

[Bryan Anderson]

No worries, I wasn't very clear in my question. I've edited it to hopefully be more clear.

[Bryan Anderson]

+1 for a great answer anyway. I'm sure someone will come to this question that really just needs a good explanation of merging and your answer will be a huge help. Also for future reference, here's how you set up VS to use a different diff/merge tool than the one built into VS: blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/articles/535573.aspx

[Edward Thomson]

I think the user here wants to disable the ability to auto-merge entirely. I'm guessing that based on the fact that the option you reference didn't exist when this question was written...

[Amitd]

Just in case if you need a link ..see this post donovanbrown.com/post/2013/01/31/…

[Tejasvi Hegde]

Works even with VS2015! great help!

[xr280xr]

This only works for conflicts, but VS doesn't always consider differences between branches to be conflicts. For instance, if you want the path to project references differ between branches.