Chapter 10. Building a Cross-Platform Twitter Application

"Twitter is a cross paradigm communications platform bridging blogs, email, IM and casual conversations. The cross platform clients just make it easier to absorb that goodness."

—James Deville, Witty

.NET is now a rich platform. You have the capability to build applications with consistent user experience and reusable code architectures that target Windows, as well as cross-platform options on the web and desktop. In this chapter, everything you've learned about application development with the Twitter API is put to use in a cross-platform, Twitter client application that you can run in a web browser or on a Windows or Mac desktop. Thanks to the power of Silverlight 3 and Windows Azure, both currently in Beta, you can build compelling Twitter applications on the cutting edge.

The Application: `Twiticism.com`

The application you'll build in this chapter is Twiticism, a simple real-time, cross-platform experience that lets users track the overall sentiment for a topic based on Search API queries. To build this application, you'll need to bring together all the skills, features, and considerations covered in earlier chapters. In addition, you'll learn how to build and deploy .NET applications on Microsoft's Azure services, enabling cloud-based hosted scenarios to help you ease the burden of deploying and scaling your own creations. You will engage with several technologies in this chapter: