Amazing!
Posted by at 11:37 PM in Technology
VSTS has an eventing model that allows it to notify 'us' when something interesting has happened. The 'us' here is interesting, VSTS can send an email when an event fires or it could call a web service.
To subscribe to an event you run the BISSubscribe tool. This tool lives in the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\TF Setup" directory on the TFS Server and you run it specifying (among other things) the event to subscribe to and the endpoint to send the event notification to (email or SOAP). Events can also be filtered using a language similar to SQL. However, unsubscribing from an event is not possible with this tool.
TFS maintains three tables (so far as I can tell) that track events, these tables are all in the TfsIntegration database. The first table is the tbl_subscription table. When you subscribe to an event TFS creates an entry in this table. Next comes the tbl_client_event table. This is where the events themselves get posted. So if you've subscribed to a checkin event, details of that event get posted here, those details include an event id (an auto increment field in the table) and the XML 'description' of the event. Finally there is the tbl_notification table. This table links the subwcription and the client_event tables, and specifies which events TFS has actually tried to deliver and includes the status of the delivery and the retry_count.
There are not many tools to help track down events within TFS so hopefully this information helps somebody.
Posted by at 10:27 AM in Net
