CodeHistorian Information

There are three main functions, and they are accessible via toolbar buttons inside Visual Studio (this can be configured) or on the right-button menu in Explorer:

click for full-size	View Historical Differences Side-by-Side View two versions of the same file side-by-side. Unlike all other file-differencing programs, Code Historian shows you the differences in your file between any two points in time. You dynamically select the comparison's start and end date from the list of revisions stored in the version control server, complete with time, author, and comment information. You can choose to ignore changes in whitespace, comments, or capitalization. The entire file can be displayed, or you can elect to show only a certain (configurable) number of lines of context around each change. With line-alterations, you can have Code Historian highlight the sub-set of the line that was actually modified. There is native support for comparing images. For image files including JPEG, GIF, PNG, WMF, ICO, CUR, and BMP, you will see the image in the before/after area instead of lines of code. For other binary formats you don't get a before/after preview but you can export or directly open old versions of the binary file. You can search through the contents of previous versions of a file. All versions and lines are displayed in the same window and you can jump to a version and line with a single click. You can also search the text of the revisions themselves. Search results appear in an attached pane, and clicking a result brings up the associated differences. Click here to see our Search dialog. All revision information can be exported to a variety of formats. Click here to see our export dialog. Selected differences can be exported to a variety of standard textual formats as well as a graphical HTML version of our side-by-side dialog (in color). You can also export revision data along with associated differences to XML for further processing. Old versions of the file can be exported to disk or loaded into a temporary file and opened using the default application for that file type.
click for full-size	Complete-File Analyses Code Historian contains many analyses you can run on your source files.  The Analysis View shows you your source file with each line colored according to some scheme.  For example, each line can be color-coded by the author who editted the line last.  Or, each line can be colored according to how recently it was changed or how "old" it is (how long its been since it was first introduced).
click for full-size	Code Review and Multi-File Search Search across multiple files for changes. The group of files to search can be a directory (recursively searched) or the files in your current workspace/solution or one of your loaded projects. You can have Code Historian look for all changes that you have not yet checked in, or you can search for all changes made in a given date or label/tag range.  The result of the search is a list of files which match the critera along with the number of changes in each.  From there you can open any of the views named above. This can be used to locate recent changes which is particularly useful for code reviews. If you need to perform remote code reviews, please see our Code Reviewer product.

Visual C++ 6.0 or Visual Studio .NET The features of Code Historian can be invoked from toolbars or menu items inside Visual C++ 6.0 or Visual Studio .NET. Initially you are given a toolbar as shown in the screenshots above, but you can configure the Code Historian commands to appear on any toolbar or in a menu.

Windows Explorer You can also access Code Historian from the right-button menu in Explorer.

Command-Line
There is a Code Historian executable that can be executed from the command-line. All of the main screens can be invoked this way. Run the executable without a command-line for usage information. The executable can be found in the installation directory that you specified during original installation (the default location is C:\Program Files\Code Historian).