The last two days I have been looking at various ways that Eclipse assists developers when working with version control systems. First, we talked about highlighting local changes, then we discussed how to automatically synchronize with the version control system. Todays tip deals with Change Sets, which is the most useful feature in Eclipse for seeing real context behind changes in version control.

To view change sets, you can synchronize as normal but by making a few changes to your Synchronize view, everything looks brighter. 

First, go to the preferences dialog in the synchronize view and ensure change sets is visible for models: 

Next, choose the drop down list on the third button in the view's toolbar to choose change sets as your view: 

Once this is chosen you'll see all changes in the batches that they were committed in. The name of each change set will be whatever the author used as the commit comment, or if they explicitly create their own change set, it will use the change set title.

You can create your own change set by clicking on the changes in the synchronize view and choosing Add To> New Change Set.

Of course the neatest way of managing your change sets would be to use Mylyn, but we'll cover that in another article.

Using the change sets view while synchronizing automatically makes viewing the differences between your local workspace and CVS simple.