Eclipsed4utoo's Blog

Not Your Ordinary Programmer

I made a post almost 3 months ago about a .Net Twitter API that I had done.  Since then, I have made some modifications to the API.  I have added a couple of more features.  I also included various classes from the System.Web namespace so that I wouldn’t need a reference to that namespace.  This allows the API to be used on a mobile device with a very small footprint(the System.Web.dll file is 5MB in size, my .dll is 52KB).

I am missing a few features from my API.  Most notably the new “Retweet” functionality and the “Lists” functionality.  I am also missing some of the account methods.  Other than that, I believe I have most, if not all, of the other methods.

This API supports both Basic Auth and OAuth.  I would advise to use OAuth, since Twitter will be depreciating Basic Auth in June 2010.  To learn more about how OAuth works, check out my other blog post where I try to explain OAuth.

Remember that this API is for the Desktop OAuth only.  Feel free to download it and make changes to allow OAuth from a web application(yes, they are different “workflows”).   Basic Auth should work for both Desktop and Web applications.

I give credit to Shannon Whitley for his original OAuth code.  I made some modifications to it, but the base code of the OAuth is his.

Here is a code snippet on using the API for OAuth authorization.

// creats instance and sets Consumer and ConsumerSecret values
TwitEclipseAPI twit = new TwitEclipseAPI();
twit.OAuthConsumerKey = "yourConsumerKey";
twit.OAuthConsumerSecret = "yourConsumerSecret";

// makes request to get unauthorized request token
// The method will concatenate the request token to Twitter's Desktop OAuth
//    url (http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize)
string url = twit.OAuthGetUnauthorizedRequestToken();

// opens the user's default browser and browses to Twitter's OAuth page
Process.Start(url);

//  You will need to get the PIN from the user
//  I just created a popup and have the user enter the PIN
//       into a textbox in the popup
frmPinPopup popup = new frmPinPopup();
popup.ShowDialog();

string PIN = popup.PIN;
popup.Dispose();

// Gets the Token and TokenSecret that will be needed for all
//   subsequent requests.  You will need to save these values to keep
//   from forcing the user to authorize your application everytime they
//   open your application.
twit.OAuthRequestAccessToken(PIN);

// You can check for success by checking the OAuthAccessToken
//    and OAuthAccessTokenSecret values.  If they are populated, then
//    it was successful.  If they are empty, then it failed.
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(twit.OAuthAccessToken) && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(twit.OAuthAccessTokenSecret))
{
    MessageBox.Show("Authorization Successful");
}

Each method of the API will check the OAuthAccessToken and OAuthAccessTokenSecret values to determine whether it needs to do the request using OAuth or Basic Auth.

I have put the code on CodePlex.  It will contain both the .dll file, and the source code.  I felt it was easier to keep up with using CodePlex.

If you have code questions, you can post here.  However, if you are on Google Wave, you can go here.  If you would like Google Wave, I have about 20 invitations that I can send out.  Using Google Wave would be much better since we could exchange code using a code snippet tool.