View Visual Studio Online build status on your Microsoft Band

I’ve been very happy with my Microsoft Band and eagerly waiting for the Band 2 to arrive. I’ve used my Band 24/7 now for 6 months, and it has worked quite well for fitness and sleep tracking. However, I’ve tried to figure out good uses for the Band at work.

Time flies, and past two years I’ve been concentrating on product development of a smashing Market Intelligence application for SharePoint, and with that we’ve doing Continuous Integration, in our current case meaning nightly builds. Every night the SharePoint application is removed from the server, and fetched, re-build, and installed using PowerShell scripts. Finally some tests cases are run towards the fresh installation to catch possible issues that are not installation related.

Now, I can of course order email notifications of failed builds (those do occur, believe it or not), but email is old skool, why not receive the build notifications somewhere else?

As you might have guessed, I use Microsoft Band for that. I have a nice Web Tile on Band showing the current status, but it will also notify me of the status when it changes.

How to do it

1. Go to Band Web Tile wizard at https://developer.microsoftband.com/WebTile and click “Get Started”
2. Select “Single page tile” and “Scrolling text wrap” and click Next
   
3. Go to your Visual Studio Online (new name is Visual Studio Team Services) build definition, and General tab
   
   
4. Select “Badge enabled”, and click the “Show url…”
5. Copy URL to clipboard and paste the URL to step 2 in Web Tile wizard and click Next
   
   
6. Drag and drop the text fields as you desire, important is to have the succeeded/failed text somewhere and click Next
   
7. Set up notifications as you wish, in my case it will notify me of failed builds only, then click Next.
   
8. On the next step, name your Web Tile, and upload a picture, then click Next
9. Finally, download the generated .webtile to your computer, and upload it to your mobile device either via E-mail, or via OneDrive/Google Drive, etc.
10. Open the .webtile on your mobile device, and it should start Microsoft Health app, and ask your confirmation to save it
11. View your build status like a boss!