The ‘Twitter Search Monitor’ application is a tutorial video and sample code that is a complete representation of the 8-part blog series listed below. This video and completed sample code demonstrates an application concept for interacting with the Twitter public search APIs. A user can search based on a term and the application will automatically poll the results at a specified interval for more search results.

If you would like to follow along with the reading behind this end-to-end application, you may follow by reading the series:

• Intro - An index to the series
• Part 1 - Really getting started with the tools
• Part 2 - Defining the UI Layout
• Part 3 - Accessing data
• Part 4 - Binding the data
• Part 5 - Integrating additional controls
• Part 6 - Polishing the UI with styles and templates
• Part 7 - Take the application out-of-browser

This complementary video to this blog series demonstrates walking through the entire development of each of these steps. It is longer than a typical ‘how do I’ video, but at the end of watching the video and reading the blog series you will have built and application that uses almost all the features you would leverage in your own business applications.

Level: 100-200

Requirements for development

If you would like to follow along with the video or download the code to run the application, you will need to have the following tools installed:

• Visual Studio Web Developer Express 2008 SP1 (or Visual Studio 2008 Standard SP1 or higher)
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
• Silverlight Toolkit (November 2009)
• Expression Blend 3 (optional)
• Knowledge of the Twitter API

While knowledge of the Twitter API is not a hard requirement, the structure of the API queries/results, etc are not the focus of this application so understanding them for making adjustments to fit your need requires understanding the documentation for the public APIs.

All of the tools listed above can be retrieved and installed from the Get Started section of the community site.

Features Covered

This application covers the following Silverlight feature concepts:

• Layout
• Web service access
• Working with syndicated (RSS) data formats
• Navigation API
• Styling controls
• Data templates
• Isolated Storage
• Taking an application out-of-browser
• Detecting network availability

Application Summary

The video provides you with an in-depth look at walking through the steps of creating this application. Additionally, both C# and Visual Basic code downloads of the completed application are provided for you to examine.

This application is a Silverlight interface on the Twitter search capabilities. Twitter is a micro-blogging/status web application that enables people to provide short updates published to the world for any subscribers – or searchers – to read. Twitter provides several APIs to interact with the data people are publishing. While some of these APIs require authentication or application keys, the search functions do not. This API was chosen to use as an example because it is freely available at the time of this publishing and nothing required to set up on a server.

Twitter Search Monitor helps a developer understand the concepts of getting started beyond ‘Hello World’ with Silverlight and covers various aspects of Silverlight development, finishing with a complete working application. This guide walks you through understanding how the various layout controls can be used within XAML to get the user interface desired. You’ll also interact with a live REST-based web API to submit queries and work with asynchronous communication. After successfully retrieving the data, understand how styles and data templates can help change the interface of the application without having to modify the functionality of the code. Finish with storing history data within Isolated Storage and taking the application out-of-browser so it can be installed on the user’s desktop.

This application is a level 100-200 learning resource. It is a single purpose application as presented here and not intended to be a complete Twitter interaction client. No significantly advanced patterns are used in this getting started application.