Setting up Beyond Compare for comparison of files in Team Foundation Server/Visual Studio

If you need to frequently compare the Version History of files in Team Foundation Server or you frequently merge files from your branches back to your trunk, the built-in File Comparison Tool in Visual Studio 2013 is an acceptable method of accomplishing this, but most developers will agree, that a tool such as Beyond Compare provides much better comparison and merging functionality than the built in File Comparison Tool provided by Visual Studio:  http://scootersoftware.com/

If you want to avoid manually copying and pasting the key into the "Enter Key" dialog after installation of Beyond Compare, you can simply rename the text file containing the license key into a file called "BC4Key.txt".  You then run the installation file from the same directory containing the BC4Key.txt file and the key will automatically be registered for you!!

Finally, in order to change Visual Studio to use Beyond Compare for comparison and merging, you can follow the instructions provided in this Support article: http://www.scootersoftware.com/support.php?zz=kb_vcs#tfs