dodo recap

16 April, 2012

The Code52 team had some big news over the weekend which I will address in a later post, but before we should get to the fun stuff about dodo.

What's been done so far

This week has been about setting up a baseline and implementing core functionality.

At this point in time, the project is split into two distinct features:

• dodo - a Windows 8 Metro application.
• boxkite - a library for interacting with the Twitter API in .NET 4.5 Metro.

dodo

The application currently supports:

• OAuth login
• Browsing the user's timeline, mentions, retweets and messages.
• settings storage - persisting the user's token between sessions
• diagnostics capture - so that we can log messages to the application's sandbox for debugging purposes.

Other functionality which as been started on but not integrated into master includes

• Grouping tweets by relative time ("just now", "last hour")
• Semantic Zoom - collapse a group of tweets to see just the user's avatars
• User Streams - rather than querying for data periodically, Twitter can stream data down to an open connection inside the app.

boxkite

Once boxkite is feature-complete, tested and documented, it will move to a separate repository with NuGet packages available so that people can consume the API.

There are no immediate plans for boxkite to support other framework versions, as:

• it uses a number of .NET 4.5-specific features - including async/await and WebAuthenticationBroker.
• there are a number of existing libraries out there for .NET apps
• I would prefer to focus on the dodo application itself in the short term.

If you still have the urge to check out a shiny new Twitter library, Matt Hamilton spent the week building a .NET 4 client called Budgie that uses the Task Parallel Library heavily.

The future of dodo

Yes, that's a joke.

I'm keen to continue building this application for several reasons:

• many developers have been interested/curious to learn about it - while the concept of a Twitter app are familiar, being able to see the internals is where the real educational value lies.
• I still have an urge to create a different experience for people to interact with Twitter. With the basics done, the next step is to focus on the UX.
• There is enough lead time to have something ready for when Windows 8 ships.
• There is still a lot of work still to do.

And yes, others are more than welcome to get involved. Come hang out.