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Sending MSN Messages from the Command Line

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 but 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 binaries from here or full source code from here. 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. I'd recommend reading the ReadMe.txt file 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!

Comments

Hugo Rodger-Brown said…
I want to be able to post to blogger.com from MSN.

Make it so.
2 Dec 2004, 14:15:00
Anonymous said…
Hi james...
I looked ALL OVER THE INTERNET but cannot find the SENDMSN tool anymore.
I used it for monitoring my application. The harddrive that contained this small tool crashed a couple of days ago.

Can you PLEASE PLEASE sen dme the new link or email me the (small) program called sendmsn.

MANY MANY thanks in advance
menno
16 Jun 2010, 19:34:00
Unknown said…
Hey menno, that app was a long time ago and unfortunately the site hosting the code was closed down (without notice)...however I will do a trawl of my archives to see if I can find the source - if so I will post an update here.

I also have a new application, soon to launch that allows you to write custom code (to monitor something) and then send an alert to growl, the awesome system tray application. If this is something that could help you out I could send you an early drop of this
16 Jun 2010, 19:58:00
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