Matt Gerega

Tag: TeamCity

  • Deprecating Microsoft Teams Notifications

    My first “owned” open source project was a TeamCity plugin to send notifications to Microsoft Teams based on build notifications in Teamcity. It was based on a similar TeamCity plugin for Slack.

    Why? Well, out of necessity. Professionally, we were migrating to using MS Teams, and we wanted functionality to post messages when builds failed/succeeded. So I copied the Slack notifier, made the requisite changes, and it worked well enough to publish. I even went the extra mile of adding some GitHub actions to build and deploy, so that I could fix dependabot security issues quickly.

    The plugin is currently published in Jetbrains’ plugin repository.

    The Sun Always Sets

    Fast-forward 5 years: both professionally and personally I have moved towards Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions for building. Why? Well, the core of them is essentially the same, as Microsoft has melded them together. For open source projects in GitHub, it is a defacto standard, and for my lab instance of Azure DevOps, well, it makes transitioning lab work to professional recommendations much easier. But none of this uses TeamCity.

    Additionally, I have spent the majority of my professional career in C/C++/C#. Java is not incredibly different at its core, but add in Maven, Spring, and the other tag-alongs that come with TeamCity plugin development, and I was well out of my league. And while I have expanded into the various Javascript languages and frameworks, I have never had a reason to dive into Java to learn.

    So, with that, I am officially deprecating this plugin. Truthfully, I have not done much in the repository recently, so this should not be a surprise. However, I wanted to formally do this so that anyone who may want to take it over (or start over, if they so desire) can do so. I will gladly turn over ownership of the code to someone willing to spend their time to improve it.

    To those who use the plugin: I appreciate all of the support from the community, and I apologize for not doing this sooner: perhaps someone will take the reins and bring the plugin up to the state it deserves.

    Thanks!

  • TeamCity Plugin for Microsoft Teams Build Notifications

    TLDR;

    I wrote a TeamCity plugin that allows you to post notifications to Microsoft Teams.  Open source, based on tcSlackBuildNotifier.  Please use and contribute!

    GitHub Repository   Build Status

    If you really care…

    IRC is back, baby!  Well, not exactly.  Corporate messaging applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams are becoming fairly commonplace in companies big and small.  They allow for your standard one-on-one messaging, but their draw comes in the form of channels for hosting and storing long-running chatter (IRC!), forming one-off group chats for large and small projects or incidents, hosting video calls in both individual and group context, and generally being the “go to” application for communication within the company.  Additionally, most of these applications have a fairly robust API layer and plugin framework to allow those of us with the desire to do it a chance to integrate with the platform.

    A few years ago, my current company started with the free version of Slack.  As part of that, we used the tcSlackBuildNotifier plugin to allow TeamCity to post to Slack channels as a notification avenue.  The Slack implementation, however, was done through what could affectionately be referred to as “back channels:” A group signed up for it to use for their own purposes and it exploded from there.  It was not long before we had outgrown the free version and were looking to purchase licenses.

    We ran into two problems: Slack is expensive for our company size, and as part of our agreements with Microsoft (specifically, Office 365), we already had access to Microsoft Teams.  After a lot of futile arguments from some of those using Slack, we went with Teams as our official company communication platform.

    My problem was that I couldn’t find a similar notification tool for Teams that we had for Slack, and my team and I really liked having the build notifications posted to the channels.  It allowed us a quick notification when something failed or succeeded after failure.

    So, I took the tcSlackBuildNotifier and modified it to allow for posting to Microsoft Teams.  It is my first foray into Maven and what amounts to a re-introduction to Java, but it gets the job done.  I will not be terrible active in maintaining it:  if something breaks I will fix it, but I don’t anticipate new features coming out.  So, if you use TeamCity and Microsoft Teams, try it out!