What does it mean when Source Control Explorer shows both branch and merge for a changeset?

Question

I am trying to understand the history of my codebase, which resides in TFS 2005, and I encountered a changeset where all changes were marked as both branch and merge.

Name    Change           Folder
------------------------------------------------
A.cs    merge, branch    $/Root/Solution/Project  

I am unable to find anything (especially on MSDN) describing what the various combinations of Add, Edit, Delete, Branch, Merge, Undelete, Encoding, etc mean. Each is pretty self explanatory when used alone and some do not make sense together like Add and Delete so I am looking for information on the legal combinations and what they mean.

Answer 1

Merge can be combined with anything except Add. On its own, Merge just means that (1) whatever happened is the result of invoking the Merge command (2) when you checkin, TFS will record the appropriate merge history metadata in addition to the changes themselves. The remaining operation(s) in the list of changetypes tells you exactly what kind of change is being applied to the target item. Thus:

Merge, Branch = an item that exists in the source branch but not the target branch is being copied over to the target for the first time