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.

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:

try
{
if ((sLineIn = _srCfMCCSV.ReadLine()) == null)
//do stuff here
}catch(){}

I can simply do

File.ReadAllLines();


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.

First thing firstusing System.Drawing.Text;

Need this to get the collection of fonts.

Here is the form load method:

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var fonts = new InstalledFontCollection();

foreach (var family in fonts.Families)
{
comboBox1.Items.Add(family.Name);
}
}


Pretty straight forward, get all the fonts into a collection called fonts, then loop through each element in this collection and add a new item to the ComboBox. One can say, hey Paul, this could be done via DataBinding – yeah, sure, here is what you would do:

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var fonts = new InstalledFontCollection().Families;
comboBox1.DataSource = fonts;
}

But let’s take a look at the output – here is what you get with my little foreach loop:

I know, not too fancy, but clean and I like clean. Now here is what you get with DataBinding:

I know, there are ways to clean this up, but why bother?

Next I just added a small text box to show how the fonts are going to look like:

To get this going, all I need is an event that will be triggered whenever the selection at the ComboBox is changed:

private void comboBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
textBox1.Font = new Font(comboBox1.SelectedItem.ToString(), 12);
}


That’s it, we are done here. It compiles, it runs, and it switches the font on the TextBox. Here is the complete code for the form:

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Drawing.Text;

private void comboBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
textBox1.Font = new Font(comboBox1.SelectedItem.ToString(), 12);
}
}
}


Beauty of C# is that it took me about 4 minutes to write this code. It is clean, simple and does exactly what it is supposed to do. It might not be the coolest technology out there, but it is good enough for what I do.