I am looking at re-working the TFS Event Handler and I was hoping that you would help me decide what handlers to build!
The original Event Handler sends emails when:
- A work item is assigned to you
- A work item that is assigned to you is reassigned to someone else
- A work item that you created is assigned to someone else.
The TFS Event Handler that I built for Team Foundation Server 2005 and Team Foundation Server 2008 used a service subscription to then handle events in a separate service host. This posed its own problems of writing the wrapper, API and host for the handlers. Well, now the Team Foundation Server team have stepped up and created their own.
The new TFS Event Handler will use these new Server Event Sinks to process the events more efficiently and quickly, but there is also the option to handle certain decision points on the server. This opens the window for Server Side check-in policies as well as a whole host of other options. These events should run more efficiently and benefit from the entire TFS Object Model that was extremely inefficient to load in the old Event Handlers.
There are lots of new integration points so I have listed all of the events here so you can get an idea what can be achieved.
| Version Control | Decision | Notification |
| CheckinNotification | ||
| PendChangesNotification | ||
| UndoPendingChangesNotification | ||
| ShelvesetNotification | ||
| WorkspaceNotification | ||
| LabelNotification | ||
| CodeChurnCompletedNotification |
Figure: Version Control events
| Build | Decision | Notification |
| BuildCompletionNotificationEvent | ||
| BuildQualityChangedNotificationEvent |
Figure: Work Item Tracking events
| Work Item Tracking | Decision | |
| WorkItemChangedEvent | ||
| WorkItemMetadataChangedNotification | ||
| WorkItemsDestroyedNotification |
Figure: Team Build Events
| Test Management | Decision | Notification |
| TestSuiteChangedNotification | ||
| TestRunChangedNotification | ||
| TestPlanChangedNotification | ||
| TestCaseResultChangedNotification | ||
| TestPointChangedNotification | ||
| TestRunCoverageUpdatedNotification | ||
| BuildCoverageUpdatedNotification | ||
| TestConfigurationChangedNotification |
Figure: Test Manager Events
| Framework | Decision | Notification |
| StructureChangedNotification | ||
| AuthorizationChangedNotification | ||
| IdentityChangedNotification | ||
| SecurityChangedNotification | ||
| SendEmailNotification | ||
| HostReadyEvent |
Figure: Framework Events
I will do a series of blog posts as I build the handlers so you can build your own, but I wanted to get the most common cases pre-built and ready to go. I know that emailing an assignment is a good one to start with, but what else do you see on the cards?
The Email handlers would not work so well in the Scrum environment, but what would?










Martin is an Senior ALM Consultant at Northwest Cadence, Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP of the Year 2011, Visual Studio ALM Rangers Champion 2011 and a Professional Scrum Trainer


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