Microsoft built Team Foundation Server (TFS) as a collection of major and minor services including version control, work item tracking, and the EventService service. I classify EventService as a minor or, better yet, supporting service. 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.
In this column, I'll examine what's available out of the box via the Visual Studio® user interface, what events are exposed by EventService, how you can create and manage subscriptions, and how you can create your own Web service to receive and process events. While I will be using Visual Studio 2008 and TFS 2008, most of this column applies equally to TFS 2005.
Project Alerts
If you start up Visual Studio 2008 with Team Foundation Client (TFC) installed and connect to an existing team project, you'll be able to access the Team menu on the main menu bar. Once you do, you will see a menu item labeled Project Alerts. If you choose this menu item, Visual Studio will open the Project Alerts dialog, which allows you to create e-mail subscriptions for up to four events (see Figure 1). TFS will format the body of the message as either plain text or HTML depending upon your preferences.
