I recently stumbled across a handy Team Foundation Build screensaver created by Jim Liddell and wanted to share it as it seems very good. For my team build talks I created a Team Build Wallboard as a code sample, however Jim has created his own as a WPF based screensaver and it looks very nice.
A few features that I particularly liked:
- Deployed as a screen saver (.scr) with full configuration options via the screen saver properties
- Ability to display multiple builds from multiple team projects
- Nice, clean WPF based vector graphics
- Multi-monitor support
The code is also pretty clean, and reminds a WPF novice like me how different a true WPF based programming model can be from WinForms. The only issue I had with it is that I had to download the source code and recompile as x86 only against the TFS2008 API’s to get it to run on my main dev machine which is a Vista x64 machine with VSTS2010 Beta 1 installed.
Anyway, the code is up on CodePlex under the permissive MS-PL license, so I would encourage you to give it a look and give Jim your feedback or even contribute back features that you would like to add.
Notice in the picture above that Jim has a Build Bunny sat next to his Build Monitor as well - great to see them breeding like, well – you know…
Those naughty naughty rabbits!
You may also like a project that I started back in February 2009 (http://scrumsprintmonitor.codeplex.com). It is also a WPF screensaver, with multimonitor support, and it tracks the completion of the current sprint, as well as the build status. It shows each team member, its available hours (even deducting the meetings scheduled in Outlook), and his estimated hours. Everything is color coded, for a quick glance.
Team Build Screen 1.2.0 has been released which includes a number of bug fixes as well as the ability to have older builds appear faded, providing an indication of how recent they are. Check it out at http://teambuildscreen.codeplex.com