Wednesday, July 15, 2009

your.flowingdata

I've been reading http://flowingdata.com/ for a while now. I was interested when the your.flowingdata tool was announced a while back but didn't bother to sign up. Decided to give it a try with the newest release. Seems like fun stuff, though I wish I had a phone w/ a real keyboard.

Anyhoo, I decided I wanted to track how many times I build my software and this is how I set it up.

First, I downloaded Twitter CLI, a command line twitter update post tool. I looked into the powershell options out there, but decided to keep it simple. I set it up in my path.

Next I opened up my trusty Visual Studio macro editor and set up a handler for OnBuildBegin like so:


    Private Sub BuildEvents_OnBuildBegin(ByVal Scope As EnvDTE.vsBuildScope, ByVal Action As EnvDTE.vsBuildAction) Handles BuildEvents.OnBuildBegin
DTE.ExecuteCommand("Tools.Shell", "twitter.bat ""d yfd compiled " & DTE.Solution.FullName & """")
End Sub



And viola, VS now direct messages @yfd every time I build.

Now I just need to hack bzflag...