C#, VB.Net, XML and mass consumption of coffee.

First of all, I have to admit that I decided to take a vacation. Vacation from everything – work, freelance, projects, blog, etc. It’s summer and despite the crappy weather here in Toronto, I am spending time with my family which actually rocks. Now vacation is over, let’s get back to coding – today I wanted to continue with Twitter examples. Twitter seems to be very hot, and I was curious as to how to get the most out of it from the coding perspective. Here is a tiny function that gets the followers of a user, providing we know the username and password:

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public string FetchFollowers(string userName, string password)
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{
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    using (var client = new WebClient())
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    {
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        client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(userName, password);
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        try
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        {
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            using (var stream = client.OpenRead("http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml"))
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            {
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                using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))
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                {
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                    return reader.ReadToEnd();
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                }
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            }
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        }
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        catch (WebException ex)
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        {
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            //insert code to deal with exception HERE               
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        }
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    }
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    return string.Empty;
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}

There are two types of “connection” between the people on twitter – followers and friends – I am too lazy to look up the difference between the two, but if you want list of friends then line 8 in the function above should look like this:

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using (var stream = client.OpenRead("http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml"));

I usually stuff the output of that in XML and then do what I need to do with it.

Let me take a break for now, next time we will cover posting to Twitter (status update).

BTW, first part of this could be found here