Sending an Email to the Developer when the Build Failed

Sending an Email to the Developer when the Build Failed


  Published on May 4, 2017 ·   4 min read
  Author: Donald L. Schulz

Over the many versions of TFS there were existing workarounds that allowed us to send an email to the developer that queued the build and it had failed. Although these workarounds did work, I always felt that this should have been handled by the alert system within TFS. What was lacking was some sort of condition that if the build failed it should go to the developer that queued it up.

More recently I was tasked to find or build another workaround that would work within the vNext version of the Build engine. Well I started down this quest collecting api’s that I could call when I thought I would have one more look at the TFS alerts, maybe there were some updates to that part of the tool.

New Notification Engine

What do you know, there were alot of changes made with this engine but not for TFS 2015, these updates show up in TFS 2017 Update 1. One more reason to update to TFS 2017 for all those still using an on premise version of TFS as this has been in VSTS for a while now. In the remainer of this post I will walk you through the steps to implement this big improvement in the notifications and how to solve that problem of just sending an email to the developer that caused the build to fail.

If you are on VSTS or TFS 2017 Update 1, the steps are exactly the same which is nice as in my line of work I always hate having to remember two different ways for doing the same thing.

New Name

Click or hover over the settings icon
First off, the alerts name has been changed to Notifications and you get to them by hovering on the Gear icon and selecting Notifications.
Click on Notifications
However, there is a difference in where you select this gear. Make sure that you are in a TFS Project, if you see the drop down on the left say Projects,
New Button
this would indicate that you are a level too high and in that case click on the Project and select one. After this page loads you should see a big blue button called “+ New”, click this button. The page changes to allow you to select “Build” under the Category and “A build fails” under the template. After you have done this click on the “Next” button.
Make your selections and click the Next button

This opens up a very different looking screen but the conditions to make this work are all there. First off we select “Specific team members” for the Deliver to choice, and in the Roles choice select the “Requested by”. This is the portion of the Notification that only selects the team member that queued up the build, in other words requested the build.

Although we had to select a project before we could get to this Notification area, in the next section the Filter, we can select “Any team project” which would apply this notification to all the TFS Projects. The filter criteria should be correct and not require any changes as this is basically gets fired off when the build has Failed. You just click on the “Finish” button and the notification is ready for testing.

Complete the details and click the Finish button

What did the Notification area above the Project do?

Well just before I let you go setting up your Notifications using the proper tool, I thought I would let you know what would have happened if we did not select a Project first before we went to the Notification screen. If you do this you will notice that on the screen some of the criteria information that we used to narrow down the notification down to the developer that requested the build would not be there. These Notifications are the subscription only ones that have been in TFS since the beginning of that product. This does feel a bit strange to me, almost like these two concepts should be the opposite of what they currently are. It is what it is but at long last we can now use the Notification engine to better suite our needs.