I am trying to get a specific version of a file by label. After I key in the lable and select OK, TFS starts the "flying files" dialog (a.k.a. "coffee time dialog") telling me it is getting a list of files to update.

Eventually I get a "Reslove conflicts" dialog telling me the local file on my machine is writable and I need to resolve the conflict. So I click the "Resolve" button and a "Resolve writable file conflict" dialog appears.

At this point, I only have two options. "Overwrite the local file/folder" and "Ignore conflict".

There is a "Compare" dropdown on the dialog but the dang thing is always disabled. It sure would be nice to be able to compare the file in TFS to the file in my mapped folder before I am forced to overwrite the file on disk. I don't want to just overwrite the file without more information on just what I may be losing. Clicking "ignore conflict" is useless too since it doesn't "get" the file and that means that I cannot even go back to the stating point and choose the "Compare" menu entry that shows up when I right-click on the item in the tree view (it is disabled until I do some kind of "get").

So why is the "Compare" capability disabled on this resolve conflict dialog?

Or: Why can't I just compare the file on disk to that in TFS to start with without having to "get" the file first? And yes I can live with comparing to the latest version. It is better than not being able to compare at all. Really it is.

I am having to resort to copying my file, resolving by overwrite and then doing my own windiff to see what if any issues exist.

Well, I would paste in an image of the dialog but I can't seem to get it into this view. The "checkout and auto merge" option is disabled along with the "compare" dropdown.

So my only choice is to overwrite since "ignore" means I won't have the file synced to the database. I believe the checkout and auto merge option is not enabled because TFS does not know what to check out. After all, I have to "get" a file before I can check it out. That is, if I look at the TFS "file" pane, the column labeld "Latest" for my items has "Not downloaded" as the text.

It is the same reason the "check out" menu entry is disabled when I right click on an item.

How to repro? I believe part of the problem is that the file on my disk is not a read-only file. If I go to file manager and change the properties to read-only and then do a "get latest", after the flying files dialog runs for a bit, the TFS "Latest" column changes to "Yes" and I do not see the conflicts dialog.

So my guess is that TFS sees the file on disk and sees it is not read-only. So it assumes I have a conflict (when I am pretty sure there is none.) It then presents me with the resolve conflicts dialog without a way to let me comare the file on disk to any version in the database. I normally would want to compare to the latest version in the database. If I have an issue with the comparison, I may want to compare with an earlier version.