A Useful Way To Launch WinDiff

A co-worker recently expressed his annoyance that certain tools installed with Visual Studio didn't have Start menu shortcuts. One in particular was WinDiff. In my experience, however, starting WinDiff by itself was never very useful. Once it was running you still had to browse to the files (or folders) you wanted to compare. I prefer selecting two items, right-clicking, and choosing WinDiff from the menu.

To set this up, create a new file, windiff.bat, with the following:

 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Tools\Bin\WinDiff.exe" %1 %2

Save the file to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\SendTo

To use, select two files in the same folder. Right-click and choose Send To > windiff.bat. This can also be used to diff the contents of two folders.