The clever folks over at CodePlex have recently released the code to the sites excellent wiki. As you would expect from CodePlex team, the code is available as a project on CodePlex at http://wikiplex.codeplex.com. Even better news is that the code has been released under the permissive MS-PL open source license.
Anyone fancy getting it integrated with Sharepoint?
Last week at TechEd 2009 North America, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Keller to discuss Teamprise past, present and future. If you have Silverlight installed you can watch the interview or you can download the video from the TechEd site.
If bunnies are just a little bit too cute and fluffy for you, then you might be interested in a little side project that reader Terry Humphries just got in touch with me about. You see Terry had no love for robotic rabbits in the build process – but an electric guitar was something that he and the other developers in his team would pay attention to. So he hooked up a vintage 1990’s Warlock Electric guitar made by B.C.Rich to TFS and let that rock their world. I thought this was a cool project so asked permission to share his email with you all. If you want to get in touch with Terry, drop me a line and I’ll send your details on to him.
From: Terry Humphries
My name is Terry Humphries and I work for EnGraph Software. I’ve been a developer for over 25 years the last three months at EnGraph. I came here to join a development team that was scaling up from a couple of developers to over 14 folks. Part of my job has been and continues to be leading EnGraph’s push into using Team System. I spend part of my time wearing a developer hat and part wearing the TFS admin, Build Sensei hat.
Having always been a strong believer in nightly builds and making sure everyone is aware of the status of the build, I’m always looking for ways to get the other developers invested in the status of the build.
Having seen Brain aka the Build Bunny and the Lava Lamp build indicator I decided it was time to create something unique for EnGraph to use.
I almost used a full size traffic light, but since all of the pcs here are named after guitar manufacturers, a Build Guitar seemed the way to go, and the search was on. It took me about three week to locate the used Warlock I used as the basis of the project. I didn’t want a run of the mill guitar, it need to be electric and it needed to have a unique look. When I got the Warlock it’s better years were behind it, the body was in bad shape. I had to end up stripping it, filling in a few dings and refinishing it with a purple undercoat and a bronze metallic pearlized overcoat.
I looked at several options for the switching mechanism for the LEDS. Basically, I wanted something that would provide the low dc power needed to drive the LEDS and a programmable interface for switching them on/off. I considered Ethernet based relays, Bluetooth based relays, Ethernet to parallel port converters, and USB controlled relays. Mostly because the other options were much more costly I settled on the USB controlled relay. I decided to mount this control circuit in its own box and use standard Ethernet cabling to get the power to the guitar from the relay. With this option the only things I had to mount in the guitar were the LEDs, the Ethernet jack, and wire connecting them.
Once I obtained everything I need I started build the controller. Wanting it to also be somewhat different I decided to mount the relay circuit old 3.5 diskette plastic case that was designed to hold 10 diskettes. After mounting the circuit board I added the ethernet jack and connected the power supply. Cut a few hole for the cables and bam the Build Guitar Controller was born.
Next, guitar time. I decided the best place to mount the LEDs was in one of the pickup coil frames, you see a Warlock comes with 2 Humbucker pickup coils each mounted in its own frame. I fashioned a piece of black plastic to fit the frame and drilled three holes for the LEDS. Then I wired the LEDS to the Ethernet jack I had placed in the jackplate.
Then I hooked everything up loaded the Phidgets drivers and using they’re control panel applet tested the wiring and after a few minutes I had everything working as planned.
The folks at Phidgets provide 2 way to interface with their devices, either directly or via a webservice, I used both. I couldn’t find a TFS event that fires when a build starts so I created a custom task that turned on the correct relay and hooked it into our build scripts via the BeforeEndToEndIteration target and then used Howard van Rooijen TFS Event Framework to react to the BuildCompletionEndpoint to set the red and green leds.
The basic code for manipulating the relays is only 9 lines:
InterfaceKit RelayPhidget = new InterfaceKit();
RelayPhidget.open("gibson", 5001);
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(
1000); //wait for the server to connect RelayPhidget.outputs[0] = false; //Set build start off
RelayPhidget.outputs[1] = true; //Set build success on
RelayPhidget.outputs[2] = false; //Set the other off
RelayPhidget.outputs[3] = false;
RelayPhidget.close();
RelayPhidget = null;
I’m not sure what else I can tell you about it other that it’s a big hit with the other developers. As for more about EnGraph you can visit our web site at www.engraph.com
Hardware:
Software:
Thanks for sharing this with me Terry, and for allowing me to post your email. For anyone interested, I’ll be talking more about integrating with Team Foundation Build API’s during my session at Tech·Ed North America 2009 next week.
DTL307 Brian the Build Bunny: Extending Team Foundation Server Build
Fri 5/15 | 9:00 AM-10:15 AM | Room 404
This session digs deep into customization of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server Build system. Learn about the .NET API for Team Foundation Build and how to use it to create your own build status display or even have your team chastised about build failures by a robotic rabbit.
My friend and fellow Team System MVP, Neno Loje, has been on a blogging frenzy this year. Recently he has published a handy Visual Studio template if you do a lot of playing with Team Foundation Server API calls (as I do), or if you are trying to play with an TFS API example that you have found on the net but are having trouble finding the assemblies required to use it.
Go check out Neno’s post now if you are serious about TFS API development, and while you are at it be sure to subscribe to his blog.
After the highly successful Developer Developer Developer event in Galway last year, this time it is moving north to my neck of the woods – Belfast. For those not familiar with the DDD events they are run on a Saturday and everyone gets together in this great free event run for the community, by the community. Session submissions are an open process – and session can be submitted by anyone and the sessions that are held are the ones with most community interest.
There are no Microsoft speakers present, just speakers from the .NET developer community – although I hear on the grapevine that our local Irish DPE’s will be hanging around the crowd to soak up the atmosphere and chat to people that want to the idea behind the get together is that we all get to share in our real world experiences and knowledge from working down at the code face.
Best of all the event is FREE, with all the speakers volunteering and facilities kindly provided by the sponsors. Not only can you learn about some of the technologies that you would have to pay to go learn about at a TechEd or PDC - the DDD events are a really great way of meeting interested and interesting people locally and making some great contacts.
So – if you are around the area then I encourage you to join me on April 4th in Belfast. If you fancy giving a talk then head over to the site quick and submit your talk idea now. Alternatively, if there is a topic that you would love to see covered then suggest it on the site.
Find out more at: http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/
Today is the first day of the new year in the office and so it is time for me to do the dance that I always do after Auld Lang Syne, and that is the Annual Year Planner Shuffle. This morning I threw away the 2008 year planner, moved the 2009 one up and printed out a new 2010 sheer.
While I have my Outlook / Google / Apple iCal calendars all synchronized and duplicated onto my mobile devices, I also love to have a simple year planner printed on a sheet of paper and up on the wall next to my desk for quick reference. I have the current year and the following year on my wall and fill it out with key dates as I know about them. Things like public holidays, conferences, release dates etc. Anything that I would want to know about when taking a quick look out in the future to do some long term planning.
My favourite year planner comes out of (I think) an Adobe Pagemaker template. I don’t have Adobe Pagemaker and so at the start a year I will search for “2010 year planner pmd” or whatever the year happens to be and generally I will find a copy of a PDF that some kind soul has published on the internet. I’ve leached the past few years (since 2007 I think) from some kind person at the University of Wolverhampton.
If you are following my lead and want to fill out a planner for this year then Mary Jo Foley has just published a list of all the Microsoft related events/conferences of 2009. Many of the items on Mary’s list with the addition EclipseCon, Eclipse 3.5 Release Milestones and the Northern Ireland Public Holidays make up most of the key public dates on my planner for 2009.
Happy New Year to everyone. What with Visual Studio Team System 2010 development progressing along with Windows 7 and Eclipse 3.5 it promises to be another interesting and busy year ahead.
Often when doing some build integration work with the TFS2008 Build API, you will want to get the latest build for a particular definition – for example to show the latest status of the build etc. To do that use the following code snippet:
Note that if you are wanting to display a continually updated list of builds, then you should take a look at the CreateQueuedBuildsView method on IBuildServer as a lot of the hard work is done for you. See my Build Wallboard example on the MSDN Code Gallery for more information.
