How to return a list of Twitter tweets using LinqToTwitter in C#

The following example shows how to use LinqToTwitter to return back tweets from a specific twitter handle.

First, download the LinqToTwitter library from http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com/ and add the reference to your project

Let's say you have your Twitter Developer API credentials stored in the web config and can be accessed through class called Config:

• Config.TwitterConsumerKey
• Config.TwitterConsumerSecret
• Config.TwitterAccessToken
• Config.TwitterAccessTokenSecret

Class that defines a single tweet:

public class Tweet
{
    public string Username { get; set; }
    public string FullName { get; set; }
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public string FormattedText { get; set; }
}

Function that returns back a list of tweets:

// function that returns the most recent tweets
public static List GetTweets(int max)
{    // get the auth
    var auth = new SingleUserAuthorizer
    {
        Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials
        {
            ConsumerKey = Config.TwitterConsumerKey,
            ConsumerSecret = Config.TwitterConsumerSecret,
            OAuthToken = Config.TwitterAccessToken,
            AccessToken = Config.TwitterAccessTokenSecret
        }
    };

    // get the context, query the last status
    var context = new TwitterContext(auth);
    var tweets =
        from tw in context.Status
        where
            tw.Type == StatusType.User &&
            tw.ScreenName == Config.TwitterHandle
        select tw;

    // handle exceptions, twitter service might be down
    try
    {
        // map to list
        return tweets
            .Take(max)
            .Select(t =>
                new Tweet
                {
                    Username = t.ScreenName,
                    FullName = t.User.Name,
                    Text = t.Text,
                    FormattedText = ParseTweet(t.Text)
                })
            .ToList();
    }
    catch (Exception) { }

    // return empty
    return new List();}

The following function will format the text to html and link up any handles, urls, and hash tags: (http://csharpmentor.blogspot.com/2011/12/parsing-twit-with-regex-in-c.html)