Released 1.6

We've got some awesome new features.  Here's what's new:

Achievements 
Because why not gamify continuous integration?

Some of our favorites are "CI Ninja" which you get when you fix someone else's build.  Or "Macgyver" which you get when you reduce build times by 15%.

View the full list of 23 achievements on our website.  As an existing user we'll even retroactively find achievements from the time you started using the app.  You can also now view an individual's achievements by clicking on their name:

SoS Online
What good are achievements and reputation if you can't do a little smack talk?  You can do that with the SoS Online button:

If you create a free account and click "Sync whenever I trigger a build" we'll put you on the leader boards and keep your personal page up to date:

We even have the capability to manually sync if you've got crazy firewall rules or work disconnected.

We'll provide more details on achievements and SoS online in a future post.  We hope you enjoy and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Setup
You shouldn't even notice, but switching to Wix toolset should make the setup experience as smooth as butter.

New CI Server: Travis 
That's the one that runs against GitHub projects.  We'll provide more Travis details in a future post. 

New CI Server: Buildbot
Thanks to @BubbaFatAss for this contribution.

Minor Features

• When people's reputation changes you can see the delta and a pretty fade animation
• The error dialog now allows you to specify contact information
• The firmware upgrade process is simpler there should be no more HidD_SetOutputReport bugs
• You can now connect to TFS with a named account rather than your windows account
• The SoS splash screen now displays the product version
• If SoS gets an error while retrieving build status it now assumes the server is unavailable and won't send an error report unless you click a new button in the lower left of the status bar

Bugs Fixed

• Issue #25: If you double click a build for TFS it now goes to the build status page rather than the artifact's page
• Issue #22: Dates displayed on the main page are now culture-aware (e.g. d/M in europe, M/d in the US)
• Issue #21: If you use Hudson or Jenkins with and set it's "Internal URL" incorrectly SoS no longer dies a terrible death
• Issue #20: If two builds occur simultaneously in TFS SoS no longer bugs out
• Issue #18: If you connect to TFS using someone else's credentials they are passed correctly in all API calls
• Issue #16: SoS now runs under non-admin accounts
• Issue #15: When you go back and edit the list of builds you're watching SoS defaults old watched builds to being checked
• Issue #14: If you use Hudson or Jenkins with and set it's "Internal URL" incorrectly SoS no longer dies a terrible death
• Issue #13: When you have multiple SoS instances open in different windows accounts SoS now gives a nice error message
• If Team City runs a scheduled clean up jobs it no longer confuses SoS
• If you haven't associated .log with a default app in Windows and you view the log you no longer get an error
• If you have rules to make the LED lights on the device stop sometimes they would never stop

Bug Prioritization

Bug Prioritization

Ever seen something like this while running the siren of shame software?

When you click the send button it shoots us an e-mail with the stack trace, and (as of version 1.6) some optional contact information.


Ways to Submit Bugs
This dialog represents one of three ways to submit bugs. In addition to in-app bug reports we additionally welcome your patches and pull requests, and as described in how to report bugs we accept bug reports through Google Code.


Priority
Unless we see a large number of similar errors we typically prioritize anything submitted via the in-app dialog as low. In other words we probably won’t get to it any time soon. For the fastest response we love patches and a pull requests. But we’ll also get right on that if you submit the bug via Google Code over here:

http://code.google.com/p/siren-of-shame/issues/list

That will allow us to start a dialog with you, gain context into your error, request relevant parts of your log files (see how to report bugs), try very hard to reproduce your error, and allow others with the same error to diagnose their problem and sign up for status notifications.


tl;dr
We welcome in-app bug reports, we prefer Google code issues, we really love patches pull and requests. Regardless we appreciate all your help in making Siren of Shame the best build monitor software around.

Released 1.5

Here's what's new:

Double click a build to see build details (86)

Oft-requested, finally implemented. This opens an appropriate URL, regardless of whether the build server is TFS, Team City, Jenkins, Hudson, Cruise Control, or Bamboo.

Display build id on main page (158)

Implemented across all CI servers. See screenshot above.

Can now sort builds (153)

Now you can keep the most recent builds on top rather than always sorting by name.

Added "Never Update" to configuration options (81)

Useful if you're on a disconnected network. Selecting this option will also disable retrieving alerts, so SoS will never try to get to the Internet at all.

Bug Fixes

• "Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created" (128)
• TFS should treat partially succeeded as failed (150)
• Team City bug: Can't move focus to the control because it is invisible, not enabled, of of a type that does not accept the focus (151)
• TeamCity error: Timed out waiting for authentication was reported as a bug is now server unavailable (154)
• CruiseControl.Net wasn't returning started date in some circumstances (155)
• Importing firmware from some other cultures was causing an error when interpreting day as month (156)
• When you close the Configure Server dialog it no longer refreshes all build status if nothing actually changed (157)

Summary

Hope you enjoy the updates. You can either download verison 1.5 here or if you're on a public network it should auto-upgrade on next install.

Firmware V3

We just released a new version of the firmware that allows you to visually identify who broke a build from across the room. To accomplish this V3 contains 71 LED patterns!

Ok, technically it only contains 11 truly unique ones, but most of them have seven variations: the main pattern followed by 0-6 blinks. To identify who broke the build from across the room simply assign a number to each developer.

So imagine you get up to fix a cup of coffee, you hear the sad trombone, you glance up to see the "Jarring Flash" LED pattern, then a pause, then three blinks, then back to "Jarring Flash". Oh crap, you're developer #3. Quick, better get back to work and fix it before anyone notices.

The 11 led patterns are:

• SOS
• Slow Pulse
• Pulse
• Chase
• Dark Chase
• Fade Chase
• Random Fades
• Random
• Jarring Flash
• Dim; and
• 255

Patterns like Slow Pulse, Random Fades, and Dim would be excellent indicators that a build has been triggered, but not broken. These patterns then would be good to allow you to see who checked in from across the room.

Sadly we had to remove audio to fit these LED patterns in our (whopping) 32K of memory, so we could only fit the sad trombone into this version. But hey, shoot us a note if you'd like a custom firmware build and we'll see what we can do.

How To Unbrick a Siren of Shame

Several of the sirens we've sent out recently have become bricked upon upgrading the firmware. Future sirens we ship should not have this issue, but if you find yourself in the following situation after an upgrade:

"It lights up, starts the spinning and then just stays lit after a few rotations (3 of 5 columns are lit). The “Show Off” button is no longer available"

Then the following procedure should unbrick you:

1. Disconnect the siren
2. Click “Upgrade Firmware” from the obscure button in the toolbar next to “Siren”
3. Select the upgrade file
4. Click “Upgrade”
5. Wait until the text below the progress bar says “Upgrading…”
6. Plug in the device before it times out (you’ll have about 10 seconds)

Siren of Shame Review

Patrice Lamarche just wrote up a wonderful Siren of Shame review, both of the application and the device. His review covers how he combined it with continuous integration to increase software quality.

Following is a part of the review I translated as best as possible from the original French with the aid of Google Translate (I do not speak French ^LR).

The developers used to perform check-ins without necessarily getting latest. This occasionally resulted in code under source control that wouldn't compile, which would produce an unpleasant surprise for the next developer getting latest.

To solve this problem and be able to more quickly respond to similar issues we established a build server with [TFS] Team Build.

...

This resulted in some progress toward our goal of being more responsive to these issues, but I still had to educate the team to pay attention to the status of the build in TFS.

We achieved this goal thanks to the siren. Team members now want to avoid the siren and lights and so they think twice about what they are about to commit *before* they check-in. The siren represents a highly visible reminder of the state of the build server. Its lights and siren are almost no longer necessary: its mere presence is sufficient.

This represents another (small step) toward increased software quality and decreased stress for the team!

Check out the entire review as translated by Google here.

Released 1.4

Here's what's new:

Play audio through windows PC speakers for build events (149)

You wouldn't strictly need this feature if you bought the USB siren -- but hey, we aim to please. So now if you right-click to customize rules there is a new option "Play the following audio in Windows".

You can play different audio per build or per person (see How To Configure Rules).

The mute button now mutes both your Windows speakers as well as any devices you have attached.

Never ever display "Moved to the tray" notifications (147)

Apparently this was seriously bothering some users.

Firmware upgrade now uses file picker (144)

We just saved you 0.5 seconds for an activity you perform at most several times a year. You're welcome.

Bug Fixes

• If you change the name of a build in Team City it is now reflected in the app (Issue #12)
• Some versions of Jenkins returned results that were parsed incorrectly (Issue #10)
• TFS Workspaces with a cloaked directory now work (Issue #9)

Get It Now

Your existing version of Siren of Shame should automatically upgrade on your next restart. If not download 1.4 here.