As part of my education on Continuous Integration and automated builds from the ground up I've been playing with CruiseControl & SDCBuild. As a consequence the project I'm working on has a slick automated build process with unit tests being run etc...I've not got as far as getting CruiseControl and code coverage in yet but it's early days and I've got some great help on tap from Howard.
I wanted to add a setup project to the .NET solution so yesterday evening I went to add the new setup project and the solution file was checked out...and the developer had left the office! Grrr!
It got me thinking - if I could MSN the guys on the project with messages at a scheduled time (eg: 17:30..."Check your code in!") and also be able to send them build progress messages from SDC scripts it would be cool! So I wrote a little utility application to do this and you can download SendMSN here (Now hosted on ProjectDistributor.NET, click the 'Source' hyperlink). It's a .NET console app that you can call from scripts/batchfiles/cmdline to send a message to a multiple set of MSN recipients. It's a bit rough and ready but it works ok. The full source is there and I'd recommend reading the ReadMe.txt file in the documents folder for instructions and more information.
I'd be interested if you find this useful and in what context it helps you? Me, I'm going to schedule it on the dev server to nag my team into checking in code before they go home for the day, and just so it targets only the offending developers I'm going to write a little console app to run a VSS status report, parse it for names with files checked out and fire off a message to them via SendMSN!!
Enjoy!
Update: I've changed the code to provide more robust cmdline handling, hopefully won't crash if you stray from the happy path (badly formed cmdline args!). Same download - use the link above.
Update: Finally amended the download link above to point to my ProjectDistributor.NET space