Areas, Iterations, and Subscriptions
Team Projects are designed to be large-- they should host many solutions. Because Team Projects can be so large, that's why the Areas and Iterations dialog is so critical. Areas and Iterations allow you to logically slice up large Team Projects in space and time. Setting up a project structure via Areas and Iterations is one of the most important jobs a project manager has.
If you're wondering what this should look like, Eric Lee posted a great example of how Microsoft's internal VSTS development teams aggressively use Areas to logically divide a Team Project:
Areas and Iterations are important for another reason: they are one of the few places you can express hierarchy within work items. Outside of areas and iterations, work items are exclusively peer-to-peer. If you want to do any kind of reporting based on hierarchy, you'll need to set up an area or iteration to support it first.
One side-effect of slicing and dicing your large Team Projects is that project email alerts become problematic. The default UI for email alerts only allows you to subscribe to emails at the project level:
On a large Team Project, it's unlikely you would want an email alert when anyone checks anything in under the Team Project. You probably want email alerts for specific areas of the tree.
To do that, you'd normally use the bissubscribe.exe command-line tool, as described on Buck's blog. It seems straightforward enough:
bissubscribe /eventType CheckinEvent /address someone@domain.com
/deliveryType EmailHtml /server http://teamsystem:8080
/filter "'Artifacts/Artifact[starts-with(@ServerItem, \"$/TeamProject/A\")]' <> null"
We'd just replace "$/TeamProject/A" with whatever path we're interested in. But there's one small problem: bissubscribe.exe is not installed on the client! It only exists on on the Team Foundation Server, at this path:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\TF Setup\bissubscribe.exe
That makes subscribing to events on a large Team Project somewhat.. problematic for the client, at least using the provided GUI. There's not even any way to browse your list of current subscriptions! There is Naren's GUI tool for creating work item subscriptions, but we were unable to quite get it to work.
The good news is that you can copy the bissubscribe.exe tool to the client and run it from there.