TFS Email Alerts

Question

I have been setting up email alerts for work items in TFS 2010 (power tools) and I'm surprised that there is no way to alert someone of a change in a work item if the ticket 'was ever' assigned to them.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but I would have thought that this would have been a common condition in alerting someone of a change to a work item.

Currently I get alerts if ticket is assigned to me or if it changes whilst it is still assigned to me, however if I assign the ticket to someone else, and they close the ticket, there is no condition I can set up to receive an alert (excluding receiving alerts on all tickets).

Any help to achieve this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't think you're going to be able to do this via the regular TFS Notification system. If you really want it you always have the option of writing an ISubscriber plugin that gets deployed to the TFS App Tier. It will allow you to write custom code to respond to TFS Events such as Work Item Changed. Then you could use the TFS API to inspect the WI History (or create a hidden field that tracks everybody it has ever been assigned to, and use the plug-in to keep this up-to-date), and send out emails.

More info on creating a TFS Plugin here: http://nakedalm.com/team-foundation-server-2010-event-handling-with-subscribers/