Improve effectiveness of Change Explorer in Visual Studio

Currently the Change Explorer View in Visual Studio does not match the effectiveness of the view seen in Eclipse.

In Visual Studio:

• All Components are shown in the tree, even those without changes, therefore the user needs to click on a component to determine if there are any changes or not within it, there does not appear to be a method to remove those unchanged components and just focus on the changed components.

• Unlike Eclipse, there are very few buttons to improve navigation of the view, for example in Eclipse it is possible to expand or collapse all components, to expand to change sets, to show the changes from one configuration, the other configuration or both configurations, none of these effective operations are provided in visual studio. In visual studio it only seems possible to apply a filter (strangely there does not appear to be a filter in Eclipse)

As a workaround the user has to either:

1. Use Eclipse Change Explorer to determine the changes

2. Reconfure flow targets and use Pending Changes view to determine differences

3. In Visual Studio Change Explorer use "Save Change Log" with the advanced option "Hide unchanged components" selected, the change log can then be used to determine which components have changes.

All of these are less efficient that if the capabilities of Change Explorer in Eclipse were present in Visual Studio namely and in terms of priority

• That by default only components with changes are shown in the view, or there is a decorator to differentiate between changes and unchanged components

• Additional buttons are provided to modify the content of the view as provided in Eclipse.