Anybody done any work with Notification Services lately? I'd appreciate the insight.

Pros - Cons; Good - Bad; Easy - Difficult.

Thanks!

Its a love hate relationship. I haven't found any other out of the box notification frameworks. So i went with it...

I have only used Notification Services for SQL 2000 but here are a couple comments:

-Testing / debugging your code is a sort of a nightmare. -Since all your code is in one XML file things can get messy easily. -The framework is not exactly intuitive. It takes a little while to get the hang of things. -No GUI tools. -Powerfull, can do much more than just send emails.

I don't regret my decision to use it, becuase i think rolling my own notification system would take a while. Although, i would be interested to see if there are any alternatives.

-Matt

Thank you very much Matt.

We have been using notification services as well.

And I agree on previous points about it.

In addition, I really suggest you to get some good book if you start working with it. I myself have Shyam Pather's 'Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Notification Services', it took me up to speed much faster than going through SDK samples myself. Also there is a lot of things mentioned which I never would have come up with otherwise. As previous poster mentioned, it really is not intuitive and requires you to know how things work with NS.

About debugging, yes it is difficult, and requires quite a bit of NS knowledge, but it is doable. As usual, better start with simple implementation and then add more things to it.