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.

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…