RDdotNET - Martin Hinshelwood

Martin Hinshelwood

Summary

Martin has been involved with computers in one way or another for as long as he can remember, but started professionally in 2000. After university Martin started out as an ASP 3.0 developer for a year working with Access and VBScript, but he breathed a sigh of relief when the .NET Framework was released in 2001 and has been working with .NET and VB ever since. He has been certified in Team Foundation Server since early 2007 and thinks it is the best thing since sliced bred. You can download Martin Hinshelwood's CV to find out more.

.NET Evangelist, Architect, Application Developer. Particularly interested in Service Orientated Architectures, client/server and relational database design using SQL Server, and .NET. Currently working in the services industry, but with a background in community networking sites. Currently specialising in MOSS 2007 and Sharepoint 3.0 as well as Team Foundation Server implementation, deployment and development.

Specialties

• In-depth knowledge of .NET 3.5 (VB9,LINQ), .NET 3.0 (WCF), .NET 2.0
• Superb understanding of Service Orientated Architecture and Software Factories.
• Solid working knowledge of all Win32 platforms.
• Experience in client-server TCP messaging system.
• Excellent understanding of e-Mentoring and other relationship management systems.
• Solid knowlage of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 and Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server

TFS Event Handler v1.3 released

Published on: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 [Permalink]

Updated and improved for Team System 2008.

http://www.codeplex.com/TFSEventHandler

The TFS Event Handler makes it easier to notify users of changes to Work Items in Team Foundation Server. You will no longer need to add individual alerts to users.

It is developed in .NET 3.5 SP1 for Team Foundation Server 2008 and is deployed as a system service.

I have added support for groups. If you add a TFS group into the Assigned To drop down all members of that group will receive notifications! 

You will need to allow groups in your Assigned to list. Below is a snippet from me Bug work item type as it stands at the moment.

   1: <FIELD reportable="dimension" type="String" name="Assigned To" refname="System.AssignedTo">

   2:   <HELPTEXT>The person assigned to act on the bug, either to fix it or to verify the fix</HELPTEXT>

   3:   <ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE />

   4:   <ALLOWEDVALUES filteritems="excludegroups">

   5:     <LISTITEM value="[project]\Contributors" />

   6:   </ALLOWEDVALUES>

   7: </FIELD>

You can see on line 4 that there is a filter for excluding the groups from the list. If you are using TFS Event Handler v1.0 or v1.1 then you will need this line. If you install the new TFS Event Handler v1.3 then you will be able to remove that and start assigning work items to Groups.

Note: Although they will now get an email, the work item will not appear in their “My Work items” query. You may want to consider creating a Query for each Group.

The Alerts that you no longer need users to individually setup are:

• A work item is assigned to you, or a group you are a member of.
• A work item that is assigned to you, or a group you are a member of is, reassigned to someone else.
• A work item that you created is assigned to someone else, or a group.

There is also a framework for creating and deploying your own event handlers that can do pretty much whatever you want. One of the shipped examples updates “Heat ITSM” whenever a work item that contains a Heat Id is changed.