Skip to main content

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

I want to be able to post to blogger.com from MSN.

Make it so.
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
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

Popular posts from this blog

Walk-Thru: Using Wolfpack to automatically deploy and smoke test your system

First, some history... The advent of NuGet has revolutionised many many aspects of the .Net ecosystem; MyGet, Chocolatey & OctopusDeploy to name a few solutions building upon its success bring even more features to the table. I also spotted that NuGet could solve a problem I was having with my OSS System Monitoring software Wolfpack ; essentially this is a core application framework that uses plugins for extension ( Wolfpack Contrib ) but how to unify, standardise and streamline how these plugins are made available? NuGet to the rescue again - I wrapped the NuGet infrastructure (I deem NuGet to be so ubiquitous and stable that is has transcended into the software "infrastrucuture" hall of fame) with a new OSS project called Sidewinder . Sidewinder allows me to wrap all my little extension and plugins in NuGet packages and deploy them directly from the Wolfpack application - it even allows me to issue a new version of Wolfpack and have Wolfpack update itself, sweet huh

Configuration in .Net 2.0

11-Dec-2007 Update I've updated this post to fix the broken images and replaced them with inline text for the example xml and accompanying C# code. This post has been by far the most hit on this blog and along with the comments about the missing images I thought it was time to update it! Whilst recreating the examples below I zipped up the working source code and xml file and loaded this onto my Project Distributor site - please download it to get a full working custom configuration to play with! Just click on the CustomConfigExampleSource link on the right hand side, then the "Source" link to get the zip. We are in the process of converting our codebase to .Net 2.0. We've used Enterprise Library to great effect so decided that we should continue with this in the form of the Jan 2006 release which targets 2.0 and I've got the job of porting our Logging, Data Access etc wrappers to EntLib 2.0. ...And so far so good - the EntLib docs aren't bad and the migrati

Castle/Windsor schema enables Visual Studio intellisense

There has been a lot of noise recently about Inversion of Control (IoC) with .Net recently (stop sniggering at the back java guys!).... I've been using IoC via the Spring.NET framework for over 2 years now - it's a completely different approach to coding and once you get your head around it everything just falls into place and development is a real joy again. As I mention, Spring.NET is my framework of choice but a recent change in employer has seen me bump up against Castle/Windsor . First impressions are that I like it - it's not as powerful or feature rich as Spring but that's not always a bad thing! The one thing I did miss though was Visual Studio intellisense when editing the configurations - Spring has an online schema that can be associated with a Spring configuration. This got me thinking - if the VS intellisense can be hooked into that easily why not create one for Windsor configuration? So I did...you can download it from my new google code site here . Remem