I just found a really helpful tool. It's called FMDiff and is made by Huslik Verlag GmbH in Germany. It's late on the Labor Day weekend day 1 - Saturday and I don't have a lot of time to write.
The important thing is that FMDiff will identify places where there are differences in scripts, fields, value lists and layouts between any two FileMaker files of the same file format. And it does the comparison in less than a minute even with my big Studio Manager product.
Just like anyone else, I occasionally have a confusion about which version of a FileMaker file is the most recent. And sometimes, I have guessed wrong which has led to there being some things added or modified in File A and other things added or modified to File B. This tool will help me resolve those questions. Invaluable!
I'm very pleased to have a tool that can do this so simply. By the way, the tool doesn't use FileMaker at all. It is written in C++ and just somehow manages to compare the two files piece by piece.
If you think you might be interested, there is a free, limited version which you can use to try it out. FMDiff costs $199. As a professional FileMaker developer, I'm glad it wasn't more because I have to have this tool.
HVG has another product that also seems very interesting called FMChecker. The version that will work on FileMaker 7-8.5 files is not yet available but scheduled to be released in early 2007. It seems to have more valuable features that I'll want.
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