Microsoft Research TechFest - XNA, a depth-sensing camera, an LCD projector, and some…

[Note: Although I, Rory Blyth, Channel 9 superstar and grade D internet celebrity am posting this video, I didn't actually make it. The credit goes to
Brian Keller - an evangelist for Team System. So... pretty cool ]
Jim Lamb and Buck Hodges on the Team Foundation Server team show off the new Continuous Integration support they are building for the "Orcas" release of Team Foundation Server! ‘nuff said. Check out the demo!
Looks great... a few questions...
1. It looks like the build agent is actually a dummy/slave machine and it is actually the TFS that monitors checkins and when a build is needed it tells a build agent to run that build. Is this the case? If so, can you have a pool of build agents rather than specifiying a specific agent for a specific build?
2. The build status UI looked like it was passive... in other words you actually had to decide to look at the build status screen to see if one failed or whatever. Is there any type of notifications that just pop-up if a build fails... sort of like cctray? CCtray makes things so easy... you can basically ignore it but a quick glance without opening any UI dialog and you can tell the status via the Green-Yellow-Red indications.
3. Is there any labeling in source control that corresponds to a build? This could perhaps be used because a build is compiled as Debug for testing but then when we decide to release the build we want to actually rebuild from the same source to create a release/install package. Or, is this just part of the build project file itself? (Sorry we have worked with TFS build at all yet.)
4. How easy is it to add additional build steps like perhaps running FxCop or Simian or Fitnesse tests? Can the reports from those third party tools be integrated into the data warehouse?
Thanks.
BOb
Are there any changes to team build that might help deal with the current hell of dependant solutions in different team projects?