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. (more…)