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

I know not too many people are coding VBA macros, however if you think about it automating office tasks can be a good way to help business people.  I can tell you that most coders will not touch it thinking that users should be able to do this themselves, most users will not be able to do this, simply because you need to actually write the code.  I can tell you that knowing VBA earned me a pretty coin, and trust me, this is not too hard to learn. 

Here is an example of how to remove all blank rows from a table in excel:

Read more…

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:

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

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:

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:

public string FetchUserDetailsAsXml(string userName, string password, string IDorScreenName)
{

}


That’s pretty much it. Need System.Net and System.Web for this, obviously. What you get out of that looks like this:

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.

I know that all 1337 hax0rz (sorry, I promise I will not be doing this any more, as a matter of fact it really bugs me when people are using this 1337 crap) are using stuff like Ruby and Python, I know that system programming is for old farts and the future is in web development and all that. I am not disputing this, but there are some cool things you can do with C# and Windows coding. For some bizzare reason, I feel that it might be a good idea to publish some code which I find neat. One of the reasons I like C# is that generally if you need a solution to a particular problem, it is most likely to be alot simpler then what I think. Here is how you get the list of all installed fonts loaded into a ComboBox. Read more…