Set up differencing capabilities

TortoiseSVN has its own program (TortoiseMerge) to show the differences between two different versions of a file. This works well with text files but since LabVIEW VIs are binary files it is advantageous to use LabVIEW's graphical differencing capabilities.

The professional version of LabVIEW has a "CMP Compare two VIs.vi" in the ...\LabVIEW x.x\project\procmphier.llb library.

The open-source "LVDiff" tool (see [1] for the main download but download the updated "lvdiff.vi" here [2] since the version currently in the .zip file does not work with VIs in libraries) provides a wrapper to call this VI.

Configure TortoiseSVN to use LVDiff for VIs

Open Windows Explorer.
Right-click on a directory and select "TortoiseSVN...Settings" from the pop-up menu.
Under "External Programs" select "Diff Viewer".
[IMG]http://i280.photobucket.com/albums/kk176/pauljlotz/DiffViewerPage.png[/IMG]

Click on the "Advanced..." button and add a ".vi" extension with the "External Program" pointing to "lvdiff.exe".
[IMG]http://i280.photobucket.com/albums/kk176/pauljlotz/SettingUpLVDiff.png[/IMG]

Comparing VIs from TortoiseSVN

To compare a file with the previous version in the repository right-click on the file in Windows explorer and select "TortoiseSVN...Diff with previous version".