John Sheehan : Blog » Twitter

@dotnetlinks, @dotnetpodcasts and @dotnetvideos

John — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:38:04 +0000

A few months back I started a Twitter account called @dotnetlinks to share the most recent interesting links that I came across. It was a combination of my submissions to ManagedAssembly and a couple other ad-hoc submissions I made via Delicious. The response has been good so far. Today a couple folks on Twitter were looking for a tech video aggregator and I thought that a .NET-specific one would be a good feature for ManagedAssembly. If you’ll recall, in my www.asp.net series I mentioned a a similar idea for a podcast directory as well. I haven’t built those yet, but as a start I’ve created @dotnetvideos and @dotnetpodcasts that I’ll start feeding with content as I come across it.

For @dotnetlinks, I don’t post every link I come across. I try to pick the cream of the crop to provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio. For videos and podcasts that won’t be as easy to do since I don’t have time to watch/listen to them all. We’ll see how it goes. It would be cool to integrate those feeds with an aggregator on ManagedAssembly to help promote the quality videos/podcasts and ignore the bad ones.

Give them a follow and if you have any ideas or feedback, let me know what you think.

Using Web Service APIs in Your Apps (Twin Cities .NET User Group Talk Video)

John — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:44:33 +0000

On November 5th I gave a talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group entitled ‘Using web service APIs in your applications’. I started out with a very brief overview of how REST APIs work and then talked about the current state of using REST APIs in .NET. I followed that up with a demonstration of a new OSS project I’m working on for making accessing REST APIs much easier. The project is called RestSharp but in the talk I refer to it as Stillwater as that was my working name for it prior to coming up with the final name.

Next I put RestSharp to use by writing a Twitter search bot that runs as an Azure worker role searching for mentions of a search term and then creating FogBugz tasks from the results. Then I demonstrated using Twilio to receive phone calls (utilizing ASP.NET MVC) and create FogBugz cases from those incoming phone calls. And lastly I demonstrated how to use RestSharp with Twilio’s REST API to initiate an outgoing phone call from a .NET app.

This was my first formal technical presentation (I gave one at jQuery Conference, but that was much more informal) and you can tell early on in the video. Stick with it however, things smooth out as they go along. Also, the audio is a little tinny with some minor background noise, but it’s not unbearable.

I’ll be posting more about RestSharp/Stillwater soon as I get closer to launching it. You can follow @RestSharp on Twitter, follow the project on GitHub or visit the official site (nothing there yet though).

Watch the Video (49:25)
Download (right click, save as): MP4 (103MB) | WMV (135MB)

Twitter Utility: Is @X following @Y?

John — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:59:52 +0000

Occasionally I come across a situation where it would be interesting to know if a certain Twitter user is following some other Twitter user. I couldn’t find the right combo of search terms to find such a thing via Google or Bing, so I thought I’d just make one. Thanks to TweetSharp, it was incredibly easy. Here’s the ASP.NET MVC Controller code:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]

public ActionResult Check() {

    return View();

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]

public ActionResult Check(string follower, string target) {

    string response = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest()

                        .Friendships().Verify(follower).IsFriendsWith(target)

                        .Request();

    response = Regex.Replace(response, @"<\/?friends>", "");

    bool following = false;

    bool.TryParse(response, out following);

    return Json(new { result = following });

The view is a simple Spark file with some jQuery that posts to the Check() method above and displays the appropriate result based on the JSON returned.

Check it out and let me know what you think!