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

Currently I am involved in a project where number of things have to be done using Twitter API. What really amazes me today is the quality of API’s available to developers. Twitter is a perfect example of such API. I will try to publish some code that I used to accomplish several tasks starting with getting the details of a Twitter user providing you are aware of the user password and username.

Following code will retrieve a variety of information about a Twitter account:

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public string FetchUserDetailsAsXml(string userName, string password, string IDorScreenName)
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{
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        if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(userName) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(password))
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        {
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            throw new ArgumentException("userName or Password are not supplied, that is not good.");
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        }
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    string url = string.Format(TwitterBaseUrlFormat, "users", "show" + "/" + IDorScreenName, "xml");
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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(url))
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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 weex)
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        {
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            if (weex.Response is HttpWebResponse)
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            {
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                if ((weex.Response as HttpWebResponse).StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.NotFound)
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                {
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                    return null;
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                }
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            }
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            throw;
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        }
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    }
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 }
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That’s pretty much it. Need System.Net and System.Web for this, obviously. What you get out of that looks like this:

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- <user>
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  <id>14381487</id>
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  <name>pzubkov</name>
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  <screen_name>pzubkov</screen_name>
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  <location>Ontario, Canada</location>
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  <description>Coder, mostly .net</description>
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<profile_image_url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/56116140/Me_normal.jpg</profile_image_url>
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  <url>http://www.paul-zubkov.com</url>
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<protected>false</protected>
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  <followers_count>39</followers_count>
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<profile_background_color>709397</profile_background_color>
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<profile_text_color>333333</profile_text_color>
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<profile_link_color>FF3300</profile_link_color>
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<profile_sidebar_fill_color>A0C5C7</profile_sidebar_fill_color>
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<profile_sidebar_border_color>86A4A6</profile_sidebar_border_color>
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  <friends_count>61</friends_count>
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  <created_at>Mon Apr 14 05:08:22 +0000 2008</created_at>
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  <favourites_count>0</favourites_count>
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  <utc_offset>-18000</utc_offset>
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  <time_zone>Eastern Time (US  Canada)</time_zone>
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<profile_background_image_url>http://static.twitter.com/images/themes/theme6/bg.gif</profile_background_image_url>
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<profile_background_tile>false</profile_background_tile>
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  <statuses_count>49</statuses_count>
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  <notifications>false</notifications>
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  <verified>false</verified>
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  <following>false</following>
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- <status>
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  <created_at>Wed Jul 01 19:15:11 +0000 2009</created_at>
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  <id>2424620582</id>
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  <text>twitter api rocks, this is sweet</text>
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  <source></source>web
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<truncated>false</truncated>
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  <in_reply_to_status_id>
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  <in_reply_to_user_id>
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  <favorited>false</favorited>
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  <in_reply_to_screen_name>
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  </in_reply_to_screen_name>
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  </in_reply_to_user_id>
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</in_reply_to_status_id></status></user>

As we can see from above, I am not an avid Twitter user myself, but I find that the API produced by Twitter is extremely well done. In Part 2 and 3 I will cover sending new update and getting followers.

Well, live and learn. This was an interesting day. I am working on a little project right now, can’t really discuss details, and quite frankly it is nothing that I am going to be too proud of once it is done. But this is not the point. I had to do some minor IO work with this and this is when I found that instead of doing stuff like:

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_fsCFileStream = new FileStream(sFileName, FileMode.Open, System.IO.FileAccess.Read);
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_srStreamReader = new StreamReader(_fsCfMCCSV, Encoding.GetEncoding(1252));
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try
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{
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    if ((sLineIn = _srCfMCCSV.ReadLine()) == null)
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        //do stuff here
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}catch(){}
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File.ReadAllLines();
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I guess I was stuck on .Net 1.3 for so long, I completely skipped 2.x and now 3.5 is full of surprises. I know I am behind times, need to catch up soon. Gone to do some reading.

In the last few years my focus was on .Net, I love C# with all my heart(my wife does not read this blog, so I am free to say that). It is the language that is structured enough and at the same time powerful and flexible. There have been many advances in .Net, WPF and MVC are exactly what was needed by the development community. Although there are still issues with .Net that have to be resolved, I feel that the framework itself is on the right track. With all my love for .Net I have forgotten about one of the languages that I had started my coding with – PHP.

One of the greatest advantages of .Net as to compare to scripting languages like PHP is ability to really trace the code diving into smallest details. I have hard time imagining debugging something without ability to “watch” the variables that I am working on. Visual Studio is a very well written IDE, I can’t even think of an IDE that comes close to VS, so I got spoiled by all this luxury, until a week ago my boss came up with a project that required use of PHP.

I decided to take on the project myself, wanted to refresh the stuff I knew about PHP and all that. By saying that I would be taking on this myself, I mean the back end, after all my designing skills are very limited and I had given up on creating nice UI long time ago. Will, the UI dude would be making this thing look nice. So after accepting the project, I had started reading on what is going on with PHP, and guess what, there have been some incredible things that were released since I last worked on PHP. Which should not be a surprise, progress can’t be stopped, just me with my deep submersion into .Net stayed completely oblivious to this part of coding. This is how I found Codeigniter.

Now, nobody is paying me for this (I wish someone did), so this is an honest plug of the framework that was done so well, I had coded that silly file sharing thingy that my boss wanted in about 3 days. Keep in mind, this was just the back end, now Will is goofing around with design, and I am sure he will do great, as usual. I found that Codeigniter made my work so much easier. Great documentation is written for the framework, there is a forum and even an IRC channel. To me, this represented a great change from the wild days of my PHP coding. I would recommend Codeigniter to everyone who is interested in doing work with PHP quickly.

Other great things I used on this project – Aptana Studio (excellent IDE, still have not figured out how to use that build in Subversion plugin) and WAMP.

FireFox has been my browser of choice for quite some time. I am the kind of guy who likes customization. There is a certain ways my computer has to be set up, its just the kind of person I am. Perhaps for me the most important feature of FireFox would be plug-ins. This is the best tool for customization of your browser. Now, I have been impressed with newest Internet Explorer, add-ons are step in the right direction, but at this point there are no add-ons to help with coding, but when it comes to FireFox, well, let me just list some:

Most obvious - Web Developer – lets just say that this is a must have if you are coding for web. List of features is just too long and I am just to lazy to list everything, lets just say without it any kind of coding for web would just take too long.

Firebug - simply put one of the best tools for debugging your web site. Add YSlow and get in depth analysis of what is going on with your project.

Pencil – free and quite powerful tool for UI prototyping and diagrams, try it out. It won’t replace industry standard software, I for one prefer Visio or coffee shop napkins and black pen, depends on where the idea strikes me, but if you need to do something quick, Pencil would do just fine.

FireFTP I can’t really count number of times I needed to ftp something quickly. FireFTP serves just that purpose. I can’t really recommend it for transferring bunch of files, keeps on timing out, but then again, I have not really played with all settings to affect that.

Codetch - an IDE like plugin which lets you work with your files in a manner similar to Dreamweaver. Once again, for a full blown project I would use a stand alone IDE, most likely Visual Studio or Komodo Edit, but for a quick change Codetch does the job.

There are more, much more. These are the things that I use quite often. Now, with all that great functionality, would I consider FireFox as a development platform? The answer is no. There are tools that are designed specifically for development purposes, while FireFox is a browser. It might be handy to keep a jump drive with overloaded FireFox installed handy for some quick coding while your machine is unavailable, but for full blow development project, there are tools that can do the job much better.

Have you ever looked at a code that you wrote several years ago? I have to do this all the time, after all I am working on the same application. Not only do I do it to fix bugs, but I do it to optimize the production code. And at times I see my old code and think what was I thinking when I wrote this. You see, with every release our main product grows, new features, core changes, you name it. One can say that we are optimizing the software by adding things our clients ask for and this leads to optimization of code. Optimizing your code is extremely important, normally there are few ways in which a particular problem could be solved, but if you are serious about your work, you do want to pick the most efficient way of doing things. Many books have been written on the subject, simple Google search will produce lots of articles concerning code optimization. Today I am not going to talk about that, instead I will talk about optimizing a developer.

If you are like me – doing coding full time and at times after hours, you want to achieve something which falls beyond simple financial compensation for you work. I want to grow as a developer. I have read somewhere that it takes roughly 10000 hours to master a task – be it musical instrument, a sport or any other activity. I think similar thing is applied to programming. I have been thinking of a way to apply optimization to myself, after all if my code can be optimized, why can’t the writer of the code. Here are some principles that I have came up with. This works for me, might not work for everyone. Once again, just my own opinion. Read more…

Bad code we all do it.

Well, I had written my share of bad code. Couple of weeks ago I had to fix up a class that was written about 4 years ago. For a while I could not believe I wrote this, but the comments on top clearly identified me as a suspect. The thing is we all write bad code sometimes. If you never wrote any bad code, please raise the hand with which you did not do it.

So, going back to the story – I was looking at it and my first impulse was to try to hide it far away so nobody would ever have to look at it. My second impulse was to rewrite it. I figured, it would probably take me about 5 hours to redo this. I did not do any of it. Instead I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, put my pride far away, printed out copies of it for all developers in the office and decided to play a game. Read more…

When it comes to development, IDE is an important part of the process. Some people still use some sort of a text editor to do all their coding, and I applaud them for it. I on the other hand am not a big proponent of typing out all your namespaces / commands / functions, nor am I capable of memorizing all the functions that are available in a language, so I use IDE. Since I am coding C# mostly, I am using Visual Studio. I have to admit – I love Visual Studio, especially with ReSharper (I don’t work for JetBrains, I just simply love this tool) added to the mix. I also have to say for the last 5 years I have not been using desktop to do my coding. I am addicted to laptops, and my boss have been kind enough to always providing me the newest and most powerful laptop budget can allow. This is why I love the idea of not using your mouse, after all, Visual Studio does come with a great deal of keyboard shortcuts, so why not use it? Read more…

Lately all coolest things are being done online. The whole concept of on-line application is a pretty revolutionary idea. You only have to maintain ONE installation, people can access your app at all times from any machine connected to internet, if you wish, and most people would, you can really track what your users are doing with your app, both to see what needs to be improved and covertly do some data mining, I can go on forever. Read more…

I had discovered ReSharper some time ago reading a blog post on more efficient ways to code. At first I was skeptical, but after installing it I became a true believer in this tool. Read more…