Hi there!

Look, what I’ve found lately. It’s really amazing. Looking through the Martin Woodward’s blog, I’ve found Brian the Build Bunny. Have you heard about it?

That blog post is pretty old, actually, but the idea is sooooo great. Well, I’ll tell you in case you haven’t heard about the Bunny.

Actually, the Build Bunny is a gadget based on the Nabaztagtag WiFi Rabbit toy. Martin made him read out details of check-ins and builds. If a build has failed then Bunny’s ears go down to show how sad he feels, but if you fix the build his ears will soon pick up again.

How does it work? Well, it is, as Martin wrote, pretty much a standard TFS event listener that then sends text to the rabbit using the Nabaztag API.

Team Foundation Server provides a mechanism by which one 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.

The code behind Brian the Build Bunny is actually very simple, a web service 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 a build bunny about the MP3 file and he downloads the file over his WiFi connection and plays it on his speakers.

If you find that post at Martin Woodward’s, there are more details provided there, as well as some code examples.

I think it’s nice to have such cute a creature to inform you about the state of your code ))