Customize Project rename email format (TFS 2015 Update 1)

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One of the investments the product team did (hidden feature Smile ) in Team Foundation Server Update 1 is moving the rename project email to a template format (XSL file), Previous to update 1 (TFS 2015 RTM) the email was embedded and you won’t be able to edit it.

The template located with the rest of Team Foundation Server templates at Drive:\%programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 14.0\Application Tier\TFSJobAgent\Transforms\1033, if you want to customize the email contents or format just editProjectRenamedEmail.xsl (make sure to backup the file first!)

TL;DR;

Team Foundation Server 2015 brings lots of exciting features, on top of the new features and the #1 voted UserVoice story was Project rename.

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When renaming a project and automatic email alert sent to the team with a predefined format mentioning some resource and the old. new name of the project.

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Challenge

Recently one of my customer went through a serious restructuring for their Team Foundation Server collections and project this involved renaming lots of projects to reflect the common codename used to identify those projects in the organizations.

While the email above seems very descriptive and gives lots of context, customer want to customize the content and the look and feel as well for this email.

TFS Templates!

Most of templates used for email alerts in Team Foundation Server are maintained at the following location Drive:\%programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 14.0\Application Tier\TFSJobAgent\Transforms\1033 To customize the alerts format you can modify their associated XSL transform files [MSDN: Customize the format for TFS email alerts]

Note: Test Plan reports are using the same approach but it’s located under Drive:\%programfiles% \Microsoft Team Foundation Server 14.0\Application Tier\Web Services\_tfs_resources\TestManagement\v1.0\Transforms\1033\TestSuite.xsl 

Only TFS 2015 Update 1 uses a template file ProjectRenamedEmail.xsl for Team Foundation 2015 RTM the email was embedded and you won’t be able to edit it.

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