Messenger Application Interface

A little while ago I saw a competition to build an MSN bot. I wasn’t organised enough to actually look into this at the time, but I’ve had a little time this week so have been building my own, personal, MSN bot.

I hadn’t really thought about using messenger as the primary interface to an application, but it actually provides a really interesting, human feel to interaction with an application. A little like a modern command line interface.

At the moment I’ve just been focusing on the fun parts – making it understand and respond to various bits of conversation. The intention is to use this an an interface for kicking off ad-hoc automated builds by shelling out to msbuild.

This means that anywhere you’re running MSN messenger, you’ll have the ability to kick off ad-hoc actions on a remote build machine. Along with chatting (or even flirting if it floats your boat) with a little MSN bot.

I noticed John Rayner has looked at this from the other side – how to have automated builds report their status to you via messenger conversation. I think combining the two would provide a great tool for managing interaction with msbuild, along with pretty much anything else.

Currently if you ask my bot about the weather, it calls out to a Yahoo weather feed, then tells you the forecast for London.

I’ve been at home quite a lot this week, so get to see what happens daytime in Soho. This is a shot of an outdoor tai-chi group who get together in the church yard…