Notification Services Tutorial

The Notification Services tutorial teaches you how to build a simple Notification Services application. The tutorial uses a SQL Server Management Studio solution to make it easy to edit tutorial files and then build the solution using SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer.

What You Will Learn

In this tutorial, you will build a weather notification application. This application will let users subscribe to and receive weather notifications for individual cities.

You will start with a minimal application definition file (ADF) and use a predefined instance configuration file (ICF) to create an instance of Notification Services that hosts the weather application. The information in the ICF and ADF is compiled and then used to create an instance database and an application database. The databases are used to store data and run the application.

You will then update the ADF to describe the weather event, notification, and subscription data, and configure application execution settings. Every time that you update the application, you apply the changes to the application database.

In the last two lessons of this tutorial, you will add subscriber and subscription data, and then add event data and view the resulting notifications.

This is a simple application that does not use some of the more advanced features of Notification Services, such as digest or multicast delivery, custom event providers, custom content formatters, and custom delivery protocols. However, this tutorial does show the core steps for building a notification application that uses Notification Services.

Requirements

Before you start the tutorial, you should be familiar with Notification Services concepts and terminology. To learn about Notification Services, see Introducing SQL Server Notification Services.

This tutorial is intended to be used on a single computer that has all the required software installed. Make sure that you have done the following:

Note

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Contents

This tutorial is divided into 11 lessons. You must complete all tutorial lessons in order to develop a working Notification Services application.

  • Lesson 2: Performing an Initial Build of the Tutorial Instance
    In this lesson, you review the application definition file (ADF) for the Weather application and the instance configuration file (ICF) for the Tutorial instance of Notification Services, and then perform an initial build of the instance and application.
  • Lesson 6: Adding an Event Provider
    In this lesson, you add a non-hosted event provider declaration to the ADF. This is used to identify events added using the event submission stored procedures.

See Also

Other Resources

SQL Server Notification Services Samples
Introducing SQL Server Notification Services
Building Notification Solutions
Deploying Notification Services
Administering Notification Services

Help and Information

Getting SQL Server 2005 Assistance