Team Foundation Server Notification Web Services Project Template

Howard van Rooijen’s Blog - Team Foundation Server Notification Web Services: Visual Studio 2005 Project Template

"Team Foundation Server offers some extensibility through event notifications these can either be in the form of an email notification or a SOAP Endpoint. To register a notification subscription you have to use the BisSubscribe.exe tool (see http://blogs.msdn.com/psheill/archive/2006/02/01/522386.aspx for more information) - which allows you to register an email address (to which an email will be sent with the event details as long as you supply the appropriate email template to convert the serialized event) or a SOAP Endpoint which will be called when the event is raised.

Scrum for Team System uses event notification to calculate work remaining at the Product Backlog level (it aggregates all child Sprint Backlog Items’ Work Remaining field) - while developing this functionality I thought it would be good to develop a template that other people could utilize for their own modifications to Team Foundation Server. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the MSDN Magazine article “Create Reusable Project And Item Templates For Your Development Team” that I found a decent mechanism for packaging and distributing this project.
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Interesting...

For reasons I’d rather not go into here, email notifications for my work TFS is a non-starter. Also I get too much crud in my inbox anyway. So on a paused background thread, I want to implement an alternate/extended notification model. Maybe RSS, maybe IM, maybe a SharePoint list/webpart or something like SharePoint’s alert model (i.e. with daily summaries, which is cool). Maybe all of these...

I’m thinking a customizable/configurable alert service. Where the user can decide how they want their alerts/notifications delivered. Maybe some come via IM (like build events), some as daily summary emails (like ACL changes) and some are available via lists/rss (like changed WorkItems).

Howard’s above post seems like just the ticket for me, doesn’t it? With it I should be able to build the system that I have in my mind’s eye.

Now all I need to do is break my Xbox 360 so I can find the time to code... ;)

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