TFS 2010 Team Alert Subscription Tool Beta

This is now released as a free VS2010 Add-In, Please refer to Visual Studio Gallery
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/418522f7-6a2a-439f-a874-5e8190bbdbc8

This actually started as a tool/hack I started to upgrade to include in the TFS Administrators Toolkit, but after some thoughts I decided that it’s probably a good idea to release it as a separate Visual Studio extension on the Visual Studio Gallery.

Team Alerts in TFS 2010
TFS 2010 has an alert system and tools to make users subscribe to alerts quite easy. What TFS 2010 doesn’t support is to setup Team Alerts (This feature is added in the public TFS 11 Beta). Although it is possible to setup Alerts for other users, TFS 2010 doesn’t offer an easy tool for this.  So if you want to setup your project or team with a nice set of alerts, you would run into trouble, as there hasn’t been an easy way to accomplish that on TFS 2010.

Team Alert Subscriptions Tool
The Team Alert Subscriptions Tool will help you to setup and apply Team Alerts for different groups in your team project. It will do this by creating Alert templates for groups, and automate creation individual alerts for each user in the targeted group.

Intended feature set
The main features will be:
•    A UI for creating Team Alerts by converting “ordinary” Alerts
•    Subscribe and Unsubscribe functions to create and remove individual subscriptions
•    Update All Team Alerts Subscriptions
To automatically apply Team Alerts then you add or remove users is possible bur would require a server part constantly connected and listening for security changes, such as a new user added to a team project group.  This will not be included in the VS add in, but might be released as a separate download or extension.

Current state
I have done most of the UI and I’m currently testing it. This is the current screenshot:

As before I’m looking for volunteers to test and contribute to the development of the Team Alerts Subscription Tools.