RDdotNET - Martin Hinshelwood

TFS Event Handler

Summary

The TFS Event Handler is an system by which users can easily write event handlers and get them actioned when TFS fires events.

The TFS Event Handler Service is a server application that attaches onto the soap events that are fired from Team Foundation Server's eventing service. The TFS Event Handler Service has two parts: The Queuer which handles the TFS events and then relays those messages over a MSMQ WCF service to the EventHandler service that loads all avilable user built Event Handlers and runs the events against the appropriate handlers.

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.