Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a collection of services including version control, work item tracking, and an EventService service. The EventService exposes a set of events that, when fired, can perform actions such as sending e-mail or making a SOAP-based Web service call.
Email alerts can easily be configured on a per project basis using Team Explorer. Once connected to the Team Server, you’ll be able to access the Team menu on the main menu bar. If you select the menu item “Project Alerts” Visual Studio will open the Project Alerts dialog, which allows you to create e-mail subscriptions for the major events associated with a particular project.
TFS will format the body of the message HTML or plain. Multiple Email addresses can be configured by separating them with a semi-colon. Email formating is controlled XSLT transforms located on the TFS server in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services\v1.0\Transforms” directory. It transforms the Event XML in to HTML or TEXT.
What if you want want to perform more extensive actions after an event is fired? The TFS EventService is designed to extensible in that TFS events can be received by your own SOAP service which can then execute code in response to a particualr event. There can be multiple services subscribed to an Event. Below is a list of the common Events and the TFS Service associated with them.
| Service | Event |
|---|---|
| Version Control | CheckInEvent |
| Team Build | BuildCompletionEvent2 |
| Team Build | BuildStatusChangeEvent |
| Team Build | BuildCompletionEvent |
| Common Structure Service | ProjectCreatedEvent |
| Common Structure Service | ProjectDeletedEvent |
To create a subscription for an custom SOAP service for an event you use the BisSubscribe.exe command-line tool installed with TFS at “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\TF Setup”.
With BisSubscribe.exe you subscribe and unsubscribe from Server wide TFS Events.
| Parameter | Command | Description |
|---|---|---|
| eventType | Subscribe | Name of the event. |
| filter | Subscribe | Filter expression. (not real sure on this one) |
| address | Subscribe | E-mail address or SOAP Web method URL for the subscriber. |
| server | Subscribe/Unsubscribe | Team Foundation Server name. |
| tag | Subscribe | A field to use later to identify this subscription. (optional) |
| deliveryType | Subscribe | Delivery type: EmailHtml, EmailPlaintext, or SOAP. |
| id | Unsubscribe | Integer ID for the subscription to be deleted when unsubscribing. |
Here are a couple of example using BisSubscribe:
To subscribe to Email notifications for the CheckinEvent for the entire server:
bissubscribe.exe /eventType CheckinEvent /address tim@someplace.com /deliveryType EmailHtml /server tfsserver
When Executed the output is this:
TF50001: Created or found an existing subscription. The subscription ID is 5.
To unsubscribe to the Email notification event:
bissubscribe.exe unsubscribe /id 5 /server tfsserver
To subscribe a SOAP Service to the CheckInEvent for the entire server:
bissubscribe /eventType CheckinEvent /address http://localhost/SOAP_WebMethod/ /deliveryType Soap /server tfsserver