TFS Event Subscription Tool

The Team Alerts dialog lets you subscribe to basic email alerts on a Team Project such as:

• My work items are changed by others.
• Anything is checked in.
• A build status changes.
• A build completes

But the dialog is severely limited; the full richness of the email subscription mechanism in TFS isn't available. To set up advanced subscriptions, you needed to use bissubscribe.exe.

This is problematic, because the command-line syntax is complicated, and also because bissubscribe.exe is only available on the TF Server.

To address this deficiency Naren posted a GUI tool that lets you create Work Item Event Subscriptions in July 2006. The tool was modified later by jatwood so that it supports all event subscriptions, along with a bunch of other enhancements The new Team Foundation Server Event Subscription Tool is up on CodePlex now.

Some examples of subscriptions you might want to create are:

• Email me when any new work item is created.
• Email me when any work item moves to the resolved state.
• Email we when a specific field changes in a work item.
• Email me when someone checks source code into a specific folder.
• Email me when someone overrides a checkin policy.