TFS 2010 Notifications

In recent days, I’ve been working on a set of process template customizations for one of our clients.  Some of the customizations include aggregations of values of child work items to parent work items.  For example, for an Epic work item, we want to see a read-only field for “hours remaining” that is the sum of all the Sprint Tasks of all the Product Backlog Items related to that Epic.

The pattern for doing this in TFS is to hook into the WorkItemChanged TFS event, providing a SOAP endpoint that gets notified when a work item is changed.  In TFS 2008, this WorkItemChanged event would fire immediately – in TFS 2010, there is a configurable delay from when the action occurs to when the event is fired.  Out of the box, the notification delay is 2 minutes.  While this might be OK in practice, when you are developing a process template, it’s really not much fun to wait 2 minutes to see if your notification worked or not.

Fortunately, this is easily changeable, and Chris Sidi at Microsoft has a great post and Powershell example of how to change this, as well as some more technical details on this notification delay:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chrisid/archive/2010/03/05/faster-delivery-of-notifications.aspx