TF203015 The Item $/path/file has an incompatible pending change. While trying to unshelve

I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Pro against Team Server 2010 and I had my project opened (apparently) as a solution from the repo, but I should've opened it as "web site". I found this out during compile, so I went to shelve my new changes and deleted the project from my local disk, then opened the project again from source (this time as web site) and now I can't unshelve my files.

Is there any way to work around this? Did I blow something up? Do I need to do maintenance at the server?

I found this question on SO #2332685 but I don't know what cache files he's talking about (I'm on XP :\ ) EDIT: Found this link after posting the question, sorry for the delay in researching, still didn't fix my problem

Of course I can't find an error code for TF203015 anywhere, so no resolution either (hence my inclusion of the number in the title, yeah?)

EDIT: I should probably mention that these files were never checked in in the first place. Does that matter? Can you shelve an unchecked item? Is that what I did wrong?

EDIT: WHAP - FOUND IT!!! Use "Undo" on the items that don't exist because they show up in pending changes as checkins.

I had deleted the files in trying to reload the workspace, even though I had shelved the changes. Then VS2010 thought those files were still pending to save. I didn't need that, so I had to figure out to "undo" the changes in Pending Changes.

Then I could unshelve.

It thought I had two ops (unshelve, commit-for-add) going simultaneously, and I thought I had only one op (unshelve).

This is a slight aside to the OP's question

You can get a TF203015 when you try and batch merge a multiple changesets from one branch to the other without due care.

Consider a situation where you have a MAIN trunk and a DEV branch. You branched DEV from MAIN and have diligently worked away at a feature in DEV; checking work back into DEV as you progressed. Now fast forward a week or two. You are now feature complete and want to merge back into MAIN.

This is where one of our devs hit this error.

He had been working on one solution for weeks, and checking changesets back into DEV periodically, so wanted to merge a non contiguous series of changesets back into MAIN. So he picks the merge option, selects the first changeset; merges without issue, then immediately went to merge the next changeset; and bang TF203015, and its very unhelpful test in the output window; incompatible pending changes.

After a little fiddling around we now realize what is going on here; the first merge created a pending change in MAIN for the developers solution. The next merge attempt was also changes to the same solution, which would require TFS to "queue up" a second set of pending changes to the same files. It cant do this.

So in this scenario TF203015 means; "The destination branch already has pending changes on some files that are changed in this changeset. Please resolve and commit the destination branch changes before performing this merge operation"

The solution; after each merge operation our developer tests the workspace for MAIN and commits the pending change caused by the merge, then goes back to DEV and repeats.

Actually sensible and simple, but masked by a very obtuse error message.

You can use the Team Foundation Server Power Tools March 2011 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb980963.aspx) that includes the command tfpt unshelve.

Once the Power Tools are installed, open a Visual Studio command prompt, change to the directory that contains the project of interest, and execute the tfpt unshelve command. It will unshelve and display the merge dialog so you can resolve the conflicts.

I credit this blog post with helping me find this solution: http://fluentbytes.com/the-how-and-why-behind-tf203015-file-has-an-incompatible-change-while-unshelving-a-shelve-set

I had what appeared to be the same issue but I had created a branch after shelving my changes and I wanted to unshelve those changes to the new branch.

TFS cannot unshelve to a different path than the path upon which the shelf was created.

Solution: I unshelved back to the original branch then I used beyond compare to merge the changes from my original branch to the new branch and checked in.