I created a Twitter account yesterday (follow me at julielermanvt) and naturally the first thing I wanted to do was figure out how to consume it.

There is lots of API documentation on the Twitter site and I knew what I was after was one of the search API features, e.g., http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=to:julielermanvt.

I also know how to create an XSD from an XML file (Visual Studio has XML tools that will do this right in the IDE) and how to create a class from an XSD file (still need to use the XSD command line tool).

However I was running into a big problem. The search API returns an ATOM or JSON feed, not XML and I was unable to create the class that I wanted to use in my little WPF app.

Finally I found this short blog post by .netTiers creator, John Roland: Read an RSS or Atom feed natively with C# (.Net Framework 3.5) that opened up my eyes.

There was a new addition to the System.ServiceModel namespace in .NET 3.5 called Syndication. It has handy classes like SyndicationFeed and SyndicationItem and a beautiful method called Load. It has all kinds of Atom and RSS classes as well.

With this, I was able to easily grab the tweets I wanted. From SyndicationItem, I could get the entire item or just the pieces I want. The author name (e.g. DevSource editor, JeffCogswell) is the first item in the item.Authors collection. The content of the tweet is contained in item.Title.Text.

Here's a little LINQ query I'm using to get just those pieces of info:

xmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create
  ("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?
    q=to:julielermanvt");
SyndicationFeed feed = 
  SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);
var tweetItems = 
  from item in feed.Items
  select new { item.Authors.First().Name,
  item.Title.Text, item.Id

Works like a charm and of course, a two minute solution rather than the time I spent futzing with the old method while I was learning my way around the Twitter APIs.

I can't help wondering if this new, err new to me, namespace stems from the RSS Toolkit project that ASP.NET team member Dmitry Robsman created in 2006. I even wrote an article about it for aspnetPRO magazine called "Playing in the ASP.NET Sandbox".