No event sound for Build Error / Build Failed / Build Succeeded

[davisr]

When I installed Intel Fortran, Ifound entries underWindows Control Panel ? "Sounds and Audio Devices" ?"Sounds" ?"Program events" that were not there before, and that seemed to correspond to the similar entries that I got with Compaq Visual Fortran. I have assigned sounds to these entries as I did with CVF,but they don't work; e.g. I don't get Hal 9000 trying to soothe me when a build fails . Am I doing something wrong? Is there some registry entry I can make that will restore this feature? (I have already tried some registry additions, but they don't work either, so I won't consume more bandwidth describing them.)

Maybe I'm attachingmore importance to this featurethan isentirely rational, but I will be grateful for any help.

Ron Davis

[Steven_L_Intel1]

As best as I can tell, Visual Studio 2002 and later does not use these sounds. The Microsoft Visual Studio section you see under Sounds is from VS6/CVF.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Ron,

Have you tried adding a Post-Build Event to play a Ta-Da for you?

You could have a Pre-Build Event start a process to play Hal 9000 during the build,

Then have a Post-Build Event shut Hal 9000 down.

Jim

[davisr]

Jim and Steve,

Thank you for your responses. Other previously available sound events, such as sounds for editing errors, seem to have disappeared too. It seems that Microsoft has entered a process of downgrading its products, as is shown by the glaring bug they have introduced with Internet Explorer 7 and, I am told,carried forward to IE8. But I digress.

Thank you for the thought about the post-build step. I have accordingly set up a post-build step by whichapplause comes out, along with congratulations in the output window, when a build succeeds, but the fundamental problem is that a post-build step does not occur when the build fails. Even a nearby colleague has complained that she no longer hears HAL 9000 say "I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.".

I can in principle imagine a pre-build step thatstarts a process that sits in the background untilthe build is finished and then plays a file selected according tothe result ofthe build, but I have not thought of a way thatsuch aprocess coulddetectthe conclusion of a failed build, so that line of thought hits the same basic problem at present.

This seems to be a topic for lateral thinking, so I will be grateful for any other thoughts, even if incomplete.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

See http://weblogs.asp.net/rrobbins/archive/2007/11/02/sound-events-for-visual-studio.aspx - looks as if this was an aberration in VS2005.

On my system, there are three separate sound groups listed with build sounds, "Microsoft Visual Studio", "Microsoft Developer", and one with a blank name. I determined that VS2008 recognizes the "Microsoft Visual Studio" group. You have to restart VS2008 to pick up any changes.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

I believe that each project can have its own pre and post build events.

You can add a project which is dependent on the build log of the .EXE (or DLL) produced by your current startupproject. Set the new project to build last in build order.

The new project runs something (AWK, PEARL, PYTHON, TECO, ...) to scan the build log for

========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

or

========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

Patterns and plays the appropriate .wav file (HAL 9000 for failure,k HALlelujah for success)

Jim Dempsey