Building your own Brian the Build Bunny

Friday, July 25, 2008

Building your own Brian the Build Bunny

Martin Woodward - Behind Brian the Build Bunny

“Since posting about Brian the Build Bunny, I have been getting a steady stream of emails from people who would like to know more about how it works.

Team Foundation Server provides a mechanism by which you can subscribe to events when certain things happen. This is actually how many of the components in TFS are integrated between themselves and like the rest of the TFS glue - Microsoft make these events available so you can customize your TFS instance.

At a high level, I purchased a Nabaztag bunny and decorated it with the Visual Studio logo and Brian the Build Bunny was born. The code behind Brian the Build Bunny is actually very simple, a web service (in my case sat in IIS on my TFS server) listens for the events and then converts this into a string on text which it sends to the Nabaztag servers. Nabaztag run this text through a Text to Speech engine and generate an MP3 file with the results, they then notify my build bunny about the MP3 file and he downloads the file over his WiFi connection and plays it on his speakers.

But if you want the full gory details then read on.

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A guide for building your own Build Bunny.

But after thinking about this for a while, I think I’d like a “You Broke the Build Nerf Gun Turret” ;)

Not that my team breaks the build, as they are very good about that and I think I’m the only one who’s broken the build (but I fixed it quickly :/ ), just because I think it would be cool… lol