Cannot merge branches due to "incompatible pending change" error

PROBLEM: Merging two branches in TFS2012 and it fails saying there are 0 errors but X warnings - refer to Output window for details. When you check the Output window you see:

"TF203015: The item $/XXX/YYY has an incompatible pending change"

SOLUTION: In my case, it was because the file in the changeset I wanted to merge (web.config) had pending changes in the target branch which had been added to "Excluded Changes".  In my case I moved the file to "Included Changes" and Checked In the changeset (so the server knew). Then I was able to merge my two branches.  I think if I had discarded my changes on the target branch for that file it would have potentially resulted in the same effect.  Some other googling showed that sometimes people had this issue due to file permissions but that wasn't the issue in my case. That's a few hours of my life I'll never get back!

Getting rid of "Only secure content is displayed" messages

PROBLEM: You have a secure page(s) on your site (e.g. online payment page) and you are getting "Only secure content is displayed" type warnings in your browser, but you're already using relative URLs for all your assets on your page.

SOLUTION: Have a look at any external assets e.g. Twitter javascript libraries etc. and see how you are linking to them.  You probably have hard coded the protocol - I'd suggest you use protocol-relative hyperlinks (this doesn’t apply to simply linking to another page e.g http://www.twitter.com, only for actual content that is being used on the page e.g. http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js). So instead of having:


            <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
            <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/UserXXX.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=2"></script>

Use this instead:

            <script type="text/javascript" src="//twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
            <script type="text/javascript" src="//twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ UserXXX .json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=2"></script>

And this will help you avoid those ugly ‘mixed content’ security warnings which you normally brush under the carpet when browsing the web (obviously make sure that the external sites offer a HTTPS version of their resource).

Some more info is here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2009/10/15/did-you-know-about-protocol-relative-hyperlinks.aspx

An alternative approach is to use javascript like Google does

   ...
        ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
   ....