TFS 2010 SDK: Integrating Twitter with TFS Programmatically

Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server 2010,TFS API,Integrate Twitter TFS,TFS Programming,ALM,TwitterSharp

Friends at ‘Twitter Sharp’ have created a wonderful .net API for twitter. With this blog post i will try to show you a basic TFS – Twitter integration scenario where i will retrieve the Team Project details programmatically and then publish these details on my twitter page. In future blogs i will be demonstrating how to create a windows service to capture the events raised by TFS and then publishing them in your social eco-system.

Download Working Demo: Integrate Twitter - Tfs Programmatically

1. Setting up Twitter API

Download Tweet Sharp from => https://github.com/danielcrenna/tweetsharp
Before you can start playing around with this, you will need to register an application on twitter. This is because Twitter uses the OAuth authentication protocol and will not issue an Access token unless your application is registered with them.
- Go to https://dev.twitter.com/ and register your application

Once you have registered your application, you will need ‘Customer Key’, ‘Customer Secret’, ‘Access Token’, ‘Access Token Secret’

2. Connecting to Twitter using the Tweet Sharp API

Create a new C# windows forms project and add reference to ‘Hammock.ClientProfile’, ‘Newtonsoft.Json’, ‘TweetSharp’

Add the following keys to the App.config (Note – The values for the keys below are in correct and if you try and connect using them then you will get an authorization failure error).

Add a new class ‘TwitterProxy’ and use the following code to connect to the TwitterService (Read more about OAuthentication - http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth)

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Configuration;

using TweetSharp;

namespace WindowsFormsApplication2

    public class TwitterProxy

        private static string _hero;

        private static string _consumerKey;

        private static string _consumerSecret;

        private static string _accessToken;

        private static string _accessTokenSecret;

        public static TwitterService ConnectToTwitter()

            _consumerKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ConsumerKey"];

            _consumerSecret = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ConsumerSecret"];

            _accessToken = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccessToken"];

            _accessTokenSecret = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccessTokenSecret"];

            return new TwitterService(_consumerKey, _consumerSecret, _accessToken, _accessTokenSecret);

Time to Tweet!

_twitterService = Proxy.TwitterProxy.ConnectToTwitter();

_twitterService.SendTweet("Hello World");

SendTweet will return the TweetStatus, If you do not get a 200 OK status that means you have failed authentication, please revisit the Access tokens.

--RESPONSE: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

X-Transaction: 1308476106-69292-41752

X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

X-Runtime: 0.03040

X-Transaction-Mask: a6183ffa5f44ef11425211f25

Pragma: no-cache

X-Access-Level: read-write

X-Revision: DEV

X-MID: bd8aa0abeccb6efba38bc0a391a73fab98e983ea

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:35:06 GMT

Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT

Last-Modified: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:35:06 GMT

Server: hi

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Content-Encoding:

Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100

Connection: Keep-Alive

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

3. Integrate with TFS

In my blog post Connect to TFS Programmatically i have in depth demonstrated how to connect to TFS using the TFS API.

   1:  // Update the AppConfig with the URI of the Team Foundation Server you want to connect to, Make sure you have View Team Project Collection Details permissions on the server

   2:          private static string _myUri = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["TfsUri"];

   3:          private static TwitterService _twitterService = null;

4:

   5:          private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

   6:          {

   7:              lblNotes.Text = string.Empty;

8:

   9:              try

  10:              {

  11:                  StringBuilder notes = new StringBuilder();

12:

  13:                  _twitterService = Proxy.TwitterProxy.ConnectToTwitter();

14:

  15:                  _twitterService.SendTweet("Hello World");

16:

  17:                  TfsConfigurationServer configurationServer =

  18:                  TfsConfigurationServerFactory.GetConfigurationServer(new Uri(_myUri));

19:

  20:                  CatalogNode catalogNode = configurationServer.CatalogNode;

21:

  22:                  ReadOnlyCollection<CatalogNode> tpcNodes = catalogNode.QueryChildren(

  23:                      new Guid[] { CatalogResourceTypes.ProjectCollection },

  24:                      false, CatalogQueryOptions.None);

25:

  26:                  // tpc = Team Project Collection

  27:                  foreach (CatalogNode tpcNode in tpcNodes)

  28:                  {

  29:                      Guid tpcId = new Guid(tpcNode.Resource.Properties["InstanceId"]);

  30:                      TfsTeamProjectCollection tpc = configurationServer.GetTeamProjectCollection(tpcId);

31:

  32:                      notes.AppendFormat("{0} Team Project Collection : {1}{0}", Environment.NewLine, tpc.Name);

  33:                      _twitterService.SendTweet(String.Format("http://Lunartech.codeplex.com - Connecting to Team Project Collection : {0} ", tpc.Name));

34:

  35:                      // Get catalog of tp = 'Team Projects' for the tpc = 'Team Project Collection'

  36:                      var tpNodes = tpcNode.QueryChildren(

  37:                          new Guid[] { CatalogResourceTypes.TeamProject },

  38:                          false, CatalogQueryOptions.None);

39:

  40:                      foreach (var p in tpNodes)

  41:                      {

  42:                          notes.AppendFormat("{0} Team Project : {1} - {2}{0}", Environment.NewLine, p.Resource.DisplayName,

"This is an open source project hosted on codeplex");

  43:                          _twitterService.SendTweet(String.Format(" Connected to Team Project: '{
0}' – '{1}' ", p.Resource.DisplayName, "This is an open source project hosted on codeplex"));

  44:                      }

  45:                  }

  46:                  notes.AppendFormat("{0} Updates posted on Twitter : {1} {0}", Environment.NewLine, @"http://twitter.com/lunartech1");

  47:                  lblNotes.Text = notes.ToString();

  48:              }

  49:              catch (Exception ex)

  50:              {

  51:                  lblError.Text = " Message : " + ex.Message + (ex.InnerException != null ? " Inner Exception : " + ex.InnerException : string.Empty);

  52:              }

  53:          }

The extensions you can build integrating TFS and Twitter are incredible!

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Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011 10:25 AM TFS2010 , TFS API | Back to top