How to Subscribe to TFS Alerts
Friday, May 7th, 2010Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) contains a collection of services including version control, work item tracking, and the EventService service. EventService exposes a set of events that performs actions such as sending e-mail or a SOAP-based Web service call.
In this blog, I’ll examine TFS capabilities to create and manage subscriptions. While I will be using Visual Studio 2008 and TFS 2008, most of this column applies equally to TFS 2005.
Built In Alerts
Alerts are notifications in e-mail when certain events occur in your team project. You can subscribe to alerts for yourself or for others, and can select to receive alert messages in either HTML or Plain Text format. However, Team Explorer has 4 different built-in alerts:
Using TFS Exposed Events
Alert subscriptions are stored on the server by team project, and you can add different alerts for each team project that you have permission to open. If you want to get notified for all new workitems, regardless of who they get assigned to, you will want a custom subscription.
There are a couple of techniques you can use to achieve this.