Team System Notifications

Team System has a built-in, extendable alerting mechanism. It is based on SQL Server 2005 Notification Services. Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services is a platform for developing and deploying applications that generate and send notifications to subscribers.

This walkthrough will help you understand the notification mechanism and provide you the knowledge needed to apply them.

Events on Team System

TFS can process the following predefined events:

Each event is  passing xml data as a parameter to its subscribers. The schema of xml parameters differs from one event to another.

You can find type definitions for TFS events parameters in this folder:

[C:]\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services\v1.0\Transforms

Subscription types

Notifications can be delivered either in the form of an email notification or of a SOAP Endpoint (a Web Service).

Query your current subscriptions

 To view a list of your current subscriptions, you have to run a query on:

Databse: TfsIntegration

Table: tbl_subscription

Query: SELECT * FROM tbl_subscription

Web service listener implementation:

Each web contains one method called "Notify". The method accepts one parameter eventXml that contains the event data based on the event's schema.

To implement the web service, use the following signature:

[SoapDocumentMethod(Action = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/Services/Notification/03/Notify", RequestNamespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/Services/Notification/03")]

[WebMethod]

public void Notify(string eventXml)

{

      Enter your code here…

}

You can download TFS Notification Web Service project template from here

Subscription tool for notifications

To subscribe to one of the events, you should use the BisSubscribe.exe tool.

You can find it at: [C]:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\TF Setup

Usage:

BisSubscribe /eventType  /address  [/deliveryType EmailHtml|EmailPlaintext|Soap]  [/server ] [/filter ] [/tag ]

BisSubscribe /unsubscribe /id  [/server ]

where:

eventType:        The name of the event.  (Case sensitive)

filter:                 A filter expression. default = none

address:            The email address or webmethod URL for the subscriber.

server:              The Team Foundation Server name.

tag:                   A field to later use to identify this subscription. default = none deliveryType: EmailHtml|EmailPlaintext|Soap indicating the preferred format. default =  Soap

id:                     The integer id for the subscription to be deleted when unsubscribing.

You can also check out open source TFS Even Subscriber GUI utility

Another way to subscribe is through the API. See this post.

Troubleshooting

(Thanks to Naren)

• Check event name spelling and casing.
• Check email address validity
• Use TFS tracing
• Check SMTP pipes and SMTP configuration