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Updated Jun 09, 2008 by bencarey
BriefIntroduction  
A brief introduction to Big Visible Cruise

What Is BVC?

BVC simply shows the status of your build at a specific moment in time. It's either green, yellow, or red. BVC will display all of the projects that are at the url that you provide.

BVC has a very simple and informative interface. A new row is added to the screen for each of the projects hosted in Cruise Control. The color of each row indicates the status of the build.

Color Meaning
GreenSuccessful Build
YellowBuilding
RedBroken Build or Exception
WhiteUnknown (or any other value)

BVC was intended to run full-screen on a dedicated monitor.

The default BVC setup will point to the CCNet Live site.

Setting Up BVC

Setting up the application is easy. Very Easy. Copy the distribution from the Downloads page (http://code.google.com/p/bigvisiblecruise/downloads), unzip it, and run BigVisibleCruise.exe.

Shortcuts

All the interaction with BVC can be done easily using keyboard shortcuts. There are only a few things that you can do, so these key combos are displayed on the bottom of the screen in very small type.

Shortcut Key Functionality
F5Forces a refresh (regardless of poll interval)
F11Toggle Fullscreen Mode
F12Open the settings window

Configuring BVC

The "Open BVC Settings" link (or F12) brings up the configuration...

The options that are available are:

Field Meaning
Dashboard UrlThis is the url to the Cruise dashboard (e.g. http://ccnetlive.thoughtworks.com/ccnet)
Check StatusThe slider will adjust the frequency that BVC will poll for status updates.
Visual AppearanceThe view for seeing the current status. If you have multiple projects, they can have a stacked view or a uniform view.

The "Validate Url" link will check for successful communication with the Cruise dashboard. If something goes wrong, you will receive an error message regarding the issue.

The "Save" button will save the valid settings. If the Dashboard Url is not valid, it will not be saved.

Clicking the save button will apply changes immediately.

Dependencies For Running BVC

The Big Visible Cruise display makes use of the REST-style interface exposed from Cruise. All of the recent Cruise builds should support this interface. To see if your Cruise instance exposes this interface, try and browse to ...

You'll also need .Net 3.5 installed.

Developing For BVC

The source is provided as a VS2008 solution.

If you would like to submit modifications, patches are appreciated. If you think something can be done better, please feel free to tell me. I'm a WPF newb, so I'm sure I've made a lot of mistakes.

If you are submitting a patch, please include the associated tests.

If you have an idea for a visualization, feel free to hack one together and send it to me. There's a lot of improvement that can be done here.


Comment by steve.donie, Jun 25, 2009

Big Visible Cruise works with Hudson! Set the url to http://mybuildserver/hudson/cc.xml for all the projects on your hudson server, or set up a view and add /cc.xml to the end of the view url - so something like http://mybuildserver/hudson/view/myNamedView/cc.xml will also work.

Comment by steve.donie, Jun 25, 2009

Here is a live hudson example. Not so interesting, since there is only one project there at the moment: http://internal.objectmentor.com:9090/cc.xml

Comment by bencarey, Jun 25, 2009

Thanks for noticing Steve.


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