Calling the Twitter API in C#

I've been working on this application to send out tweets at a particular time.  One thing thing I want to do is be able to look at the logged in user's timeline.  I've been playing with the ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX Previews, so I thought I would marry the two.  As a result, I wrote the WCF code below in C#.  Note that the password is hidden, so the code won't work until you add that in.  Basically, I make a request to get the friends timeline.  This gives me the most recent 20 posts by default. I store the result in an XmlDocument.  I need to get that data out as a complex object of type UserStatusSvc as I am returning an array of that type.  I used Linq to Xml for that.

          [OperationContract]
        public UserStatusSvc[] GetUserTimeLine(string username)
        {
            string url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml";
            //string user = Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(username + ":" + password));
            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
            request.Method = "POST"; // <--- you probably need to change this to a GET after a twitter change a couple of months ago.
            request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            string responseString = reader.ReadToEnd();
            reader.Close();
            XmlDocument xmld = new XmlDocument();
            xmld.LoadXml(responseString);
            XDocument document = XDocument.Parse(responseString);

            var query = from e in document.Root.Descendants()
                        where e.Element("user") != null
                        select new UserStatusSvc
                        {
                            UserName = e.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value,
                            ProfileImage = e.Element("user").Element("profile_image_url").Value,
                            Status = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(e.Element("text").Value),
                            StatusDate = e.Value.ParseDateTime().ToString()
                        };

            var users = (from u in query
                         where u.Status != ""
                         select u).ToList();

            return (users.ToArray());
        }

Here's the definition of my UserStatusSvc object.

    [DataContract]
    public class UserStatusSvc
    {
        [DataMember]
        public string UserName { get; set; }
        [DataMember]
        public string ProfileImage { get; set; }
        [DataMember]
        public string Status { get; set; }
        [DataMember]
        public string StatusDate { get; set; }
    }

    public static class StringExtensions
    {
        public static DateTime ParseDateTime(this string date)
        {
            string dayOfWeek = date.Substring(0, 3).Trim();
            string month = date.Substring(4, 3).Trim();
            string dayInMonth = date.Substring(8, 2).Trim();
            string time = date.Substring(11, 9).Trim();
            string offset = date.Substring(20, 5).Trim();
            string year = date.Substring(25, 5).Trim();
            string dateTime = string.Format("{0}-{1}-{2} {3}", dayInMonth, month, year, time);
            DateTime ret = DateTime.Parse(dateTime);
            return ret;
        }
    }

Thanks to Tim Heuer for some code he posted on his blog to get me started.  I have primarily stolen his code and reposted it here.  :-)

Original Url: http://morewally.com/cs/blogs/wallym/archive/2009/03/17/calling-the-twitter-api-in-c.aspx

PS. I modified this code example to remove the hokey CheckForNull(...).  It was stupid and not necessary.  I didn't realize I had left it in until I got hassled for it.  The line 'where Element("user") != null' resolved my problem.