I just was recovering the menu of my blog, because the links of my projects as well as the button for switching the language were not shown since the last update anymore. As I was just adding some stuff I realized that the BlogEngine has a widget for twitter.

What is twitter?

Twitter ist a page where you can leave short messages (almost like a SMS) to share with your friends what you're just doing. Others then can register themselves to stay up-to-date with your news. It's some kind of bulk-SMS with self-registration.

What I think about twitter?

I think twitter is a very nice idea, that could get big very fast. The only problem with twitter is that the people you want to share your thoughts with, need to be interested in you. That means - if noone watches your twitter-feed, noone will ever read it.

So if you got friends that are interested in reading what you're doing all day - twitter is a realy good tool to accomplish that - if not - you should know what twitter is, just to be able to discuss with someone, but you should save the time for writing the texts.

One nice thing about twitter is: You may set your messages to private-only. In this case everyone has to ask for your permission to subscribe to your feed.

Twitter-Widget

My intention was to write a short script to enable the BlogEngine to get my feeds. Twitter is very easy to handle, because it publishes a rss feed of every user which you can even limit by the specific parameter to save your and your servers traffic. But as I already told you earlier, BlogEngine already has a tool to do this for me, so I just had to insert my twitter-data (address and rss feed) so the tool could fetch them for me.

Twhirl

Because sometimes it's very annoying to login on twitter.com to post your last message, there're several tools which you can install on your PC that do the login, posting and even the retrieving of your friends feeds for you. One of these tools, that is unfortunately not listed in the downloads section of twitter.com is twhirl. Twhirl is a desktop client for twitter, based on Adobe Air. But even though this requires you to install Adobe Air, it's not a big deal, because the Air- as well as the twhirl-installation are almost self-running. As soon as you installed twhirl, you're getting the following list-view, which you can style by a well filled list of skins:

Summing up:

It's a quite nice idea for chatty people, but you have to have the nerves to always keep your messages up-to-date - and people that are willing to read what you're writing - otherwise twitter would be like an instant messenger without contacts ;-).

At the moment I'm using most of my time for learning WPF, because a while ago I got the crazy idea (I must have been drunk) that this could become my first MCTS certificate ;-). Since then I'm experiencing a continuos up and down everytime I open my Visual Studio. I mean - hey - wouldn't it be boring to always know what a method returns? I haven't casted as much as since I know WPF - and it's always a pleasure to think about what I could insert into a method, which expects only a completly unknown interface.

The first book I used for studying was, of course, the Microsoft "Training Kit". And exactly in that book I found a funny example that can demonstrate my feelings as good as nothing else.

The example explains how to write my own custom-button - I didn't keep the colors of the example I must confess - but all summed up I got something like this:

While I was enjoying the beautiful animation I was able to attach to the button (it got shrunk almost invisible and returned to its origin size), I recognized that there was something strange: The button got smaller and smaller ...

Obviously WPF replaces the origin size of the button, when it's clicked before the AutoReverse of the Animation finished. Ok - in some way this might be logical, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to handle an object that just is being animated. But I think this is one of the many small things that give WPF some kind of unfinished touch...