Alternatives to e-mails for alerts from TFS in Visual Studio?

Question

Are there other ways to receive alerts from TFS, besides e-mails? I would rather keep my e-mail inbox clean, and have some kind of notification icon or banner, like here on StackOverflow when you have new messages.

EDIT: In my case, it would be useful to know when changes have been pushed to trunk, so that I can keep my code synched and avoid big merges.

Answer 1

Except emails you could also use some 3-rd party tool/extension to get the notification from TFS/Azure DevOps.

However as a limitation, most of them mainly only support the notification of CI build/release/work item area.

For example:

Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio

The Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio integrate build notification directly into Visual Studio. This results in a toast notification whenever you have Visual Studio open:

Catlight

Another great tool to get build notifications is Catlight, it runs from the task tray and will even notify you when Visual studio isn't open:

Siren of Shame

And another option is Siren of Shame, which also offers integration with a USB emergency light that will start blinking when the build fails:

More details please take a look at jessehouwing and CJBS 's reply in this question:

Notifications for successful automated builds to each team member