We are pleased to announce that we've just released a beta of ExamDiff Pro 4.5!

The most important features that we added to the beta are fuzzy line matching and the ability to recognize moved blocks, both of which I have described in previous blog entries. ExamDiff Pro 4.5 Beta also introduces a revamped diff bar interface, and a number of improvements for file editing, including line modification marks, improved block operations, resolved block recognition, and smarter Undo/Redo.

ExamDiff Pro 4.5 Beta also adds a number of smaller features. File encoding (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE) can now be specified for opening or saving files. Linebreaks are now highlighted when they are different, and word wrap can now fit to window. Finally, ExamDiff Pro 4.5 Beta introduces many usability improvements: daylight savings time differences can be ignored, items can be quickly deleted from drop-down lists, and status bars for files now display file size and number of lines.

You can find more details about the 4.5 beta, and a download link, here.

I'm pleased to announce the release of FtpVC 2.5a, which features several important bug fixes and improvements. You can see the FtpVC Version History page for more detailed information about the release.

Note that this version uses a new scheme of naming stub files. As a result, all of your client desktops have to upgrade to 2.5a at the same time, and all checked-out files have to be checked in before the upgrade. FtpVC 2.5a will read the old stubs and convert them to the new format but the old versions of FtpVC will not be able to read the new stubs.

If "Perform full comparison" is disabled under Options | Dir Comparison, in order to reduce comparison time, ExamDiff Pro identifies differences in matching files by comparing their timestamps, sizes, attributes, CRCs etc, without actually comparing the contents of the files. While this is adequate for most purposes, sometimes you may wish to know for certain whether a pair of files is identical or changed. For this, ExamDiff Pro provides a handy feature to only perform full comparison on certain files.

First let's compare two directories. Because "Perform full comparison" is not used, ExamDiff Pro does not tell us whether pairs of files are identical or changed, but rather marks matching files as Older or Newer.

To perform full comparison on a certain pair of files, select a file or multiple files in one of the comparison panes and either use the Directories | Perform Full Comparison menu command, or right-click on the selected file(s) and choose "Perform Full Comparison" from the context menu. In this case I'm going to compare all of the files.

After all the files are compared, we can clearly see which files are changed and which files are identical. Keep in mind that if you routinely need to perform full comparison on large amounts of files, it may be simpler for you to enable "Perform full comparison" under Options | Dir Comparison, in which full comparison will automatically be performed on all files.