Sending Tweets with C#

If you ever want to send updates to Twitter from C# it fairly easy to do. Recently, we added the option to send a tweet when someone registers for our upcoming dotNed user group meeting. Below is the client code.

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
 
namespace Dotned.UI.Framework
{
    public class TwitterClient
    {
        public string Username { get; set; }
        public string Password { get; set; }
        public Exception Error { get; set; }
        private string _twitterUpdateUrl = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json";
 
        public TwitterClient(string userName, string password)
        {
            this.Username = userName;
            this.Password = password;
        }
 
        public void SendMessage(string message)
        {
            try
            {
                HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(_twitterUpdateUrl);
                request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(this.Username, this.Password);
 
                SetRequestParams(request);
 
                string post = string.Format("status={0}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(message));
                
                using (Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
                {
                    using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(requestStream))
                    {
                        writer.Write(post);
                    }
                }
 
                WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
                string content;
 
                using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
                {
                    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(responseStream))
                    {
                        content = reader.ReadToEnd();
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Error = ex;
            }
        }
 
        private static void SetRequestParams(HttpWebRequest request)
        {
            System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;
            request.Timeout = 50000;
            request.Method = "POST";
            request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; 
        }
    }
}

It is important to notice that you need to set a static flag in the ServicePointManager. Otherwise, Twitter will reply with error 417 – Expectation Failed. Here’s an example that shows how to use this class:

   1: TwitterClient client = new TwitterClient("__Sander", "[not telling you of course...]");
   2: client.SendMessage("Testing my twitter client code.");