Team Build RSS Feed

<Update: After some complains that it is difficult to cut paste code out of the blog, I have zipped and placed the source here >
<Update: Fixed so that you no longer need to copy the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common.dll. Thanks to a Watson bug we got to this>

A lot of programmers have the disease of trying to code everything for themselves. Sometime back I had a bout of the same disease.

We wanted a tool which would notify the user when a Team Build is fired/completed. Having used bug-tracker tools before which polls bug databases and shows pop-up notifications I immediately got excited and wrote my own super-mutithreaded application called BuildTicker. It could do all the fancy things like track multiple Team Foundation Servers in different threads and show translucent pop-ups like Outlook 2003, had fancy owner-drawn UI. I even made the tool extendable so that I can plugin a bug-tracker for Team Foundation work-item tracking in future. All the while I kind of missed the point that all we need is a way to syndicate the information and rarely there is a way better than using existing technology and standards. JeffLu's source control RSS feed kind of got me to my senses. So here I am with a RSS feed for team build. This kind of retires the fancy BuildTicker I wrote before....

How to use

  1. Unzip the sources into Team Foundation Server folder as in %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation 2005\Web Services\Build\v1.0
  2. Add people whom you want to be able to see the feed in the Reader group for the team project.
  3. Use a feed reader like RSS Bandit which supports windows authentication. And for the feed url use https://<TFSServer>:<port>/Build/v1.0/rss.aspx?TeamProject=ProjectName replace the part marked in blue with your TFS and project name

The Source

<removed: Use the link to the source zip above >

Note:

This feed reader does not have the DOS attack blocker as in Jeff's feed reader....

TeamBuildRssFeed.zip