I prefer following people that follow me back on twitter. So I normally check http://www.friendorfollow.com/ and generally unfollow people that aren't following me. While digging around the twitter dev site I found the REST APIs and I wanted to see what I could do with them. I figured a little console app that showed me who isn't following me back might be a decent challenge so I set off creating one.

I normally post step by step instructions of what I did in my blog posts, however this time I'm included the source code of the app so people can do whatever they want with it and I'm going to give you a basic run down of how the app works. You can download it here: http://heathesh.com/code/csharp/TwitterFollowerTest.zip

To begin with, I used the Twitter REST API to get a Json dataset of all the people I follow and all the people following me (I created a setting called "UserToCheck" in the app.config file so you can simply change this to any twitter handle to run the check for that account). I used Json.NET (http://james.newtonking.com/projects/json-net.aspx) to parse this Json into a simple list of user ids for each of the above. Then I simply iterated through the list and for anybody who wasn't following me I used another Twitter REST API call to get back that user's details in another Json dataset.

In order to make the user's detail more "user friendly" I created a simple class called TwitterUser and using the "DescriptionAttribute", reflection and Json.NET I populated this object with the Json dataset. Then I simply write out each screen name of whomever is not following me but from the code you will see you have a fully populated TwitterUser object which you could do quite a bit with (like display their twitter pic, bio etc.).

I'm pretty sure the code is pretty self-explanatory, but as usual if you have any questions feel free to contact me using my Contact page (http://heathesh.com/contact.aspx).

Happy tweeting!

To simplify this I'm just going to give you a step by step of what I did, I hope this helps you. If you have any problems with it please feel free to use my Contact page to get in touch and see if I can help you.

1. Run the Sql Server Configuration Manager

All Programs --> Microsoft Sql Server 2008 --> Configuration Tools --> Sql Server Configuration Manager

2. Select "SQL Server Services" which will populate the frame on the right, then right click and select "Properties" on the SQL Server Instance you want to enable this on

3. Select the FILESTREAM tab, check all the checkboxes on the tab

4. Click "Apply" then "OK"

5. Close the "Sql Server Configuration Manager", and open SQL Server Management Studio.

6. Connect to your SQL instance and then right click the instance name and select "Restart".

7. Next select "New Query".

8. Copy and paste the following into the window and run it, you only need to change "[Your Database Name]" to whatever the database you're trying to enable the filestream on:

EXEC sp_configure filestream_access_level, 2

RECONFIGURE

alter database [Your Database Name]
add FILEGROUP [MY_FILESTREAM] CONTAINS FILESTREAM

8. Install the following hotfix:

http://hotfixv4.microsoft.com/Windows%20XP/sp4/Fix303510/2600/free/403099_ENU_i386_zip.exe

If that link above is broken for whatever reason, you'll have to download the hotfix by starting here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=978835

They require you to supply them with your email address for some reason, I have no idea why.

9. Restart your PC.

10. Once restarted, open "SQL Server Management Studio" and run this (feel free to change the file location if you need to):

alter database [Your Database Name]
add FILE ( NAME = N'my_filestream', FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQL2008\MSSQL\DATA\MyFileStream.Repository' )
TO filegroup [MY_FILESTREAM]

That should be it. Happy streaming!

While working on a project I came across an interesting problem. I had a list of items to process and I wanted to run a certain number of those items at the same time and let the number of items running at the same time be set in a settings file. To illustrate how I did this, let's start of with the items I was going to process. In this case let's say I had a class called "Queue" and each "Queue" item was something I need to do some work with.

    /// <summary>
    /// Queue entity
    /// </summary>
    public class Queue
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the id
        /// </summary>
        public int Id { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the name
        /// </summary>
        public string Name { get; set; }
    }

Now in my application, I have a list of these Queue items and I want to be able to process more than one at a time, and I want to be able to set how many items I'm processing at a time in a settings file. So I added a setting file called "QueueSettings.settings" and added a setting called NumberOfThreads which I set to "3".

Now let's pretend my List of queued items to process looks like this:

            List<Queue> queuedItems = new List<Queue>();
           
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 1, Name = "Apple" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 2, Name = "Banana" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 3, Name = "Orange" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 4, Name = "Pear" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 5, Name = "Peach" });

And for simplicity sake, the method that actually processes the Queue item looks like this:

        /// <summary>
        /// Process the queued item
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="queue"></param>
        private static void processQueuedItem(Queue queue)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Processed: {0} - {1}", queue.Id, queue.Name);
        }

Now we need to create a method that will call the above method as we require. So we first add the following namespace to our application:

        using System.Threading.Tasks;

Then we create the method that does the actual processing:

        /// <summary>
        /// Processes the queued items
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="queuedItems"></param>
        /// <param name="threadsToUse"></param>
        private static void processQueuedItems(List<Queue> queuedItems, int threadsToUse)
        {
            //calculate how many times we need to loop, by determining how many times we'll do a full set of
            //items and adding one for the remainder of items. For example, if you have 5 items and you're threading
            //3 at a time, you need to run twice, once to do the first 3, then once to finish off the last 2
            int timesToLoop = ((queuedItems.Count % threadsToUse) > 0 ? 1 : 0) + queuedItems.Count / threadsToUse;

            //set a current record number which we will use to make sure we don't process the same item
            //more than once
            int currentRecordNumber = 0;

            //loop through the amount of times we need to loop
            for (int i = 0; i < timesToLoop; i++)
            {
                if ((currentRecordNumber + threadsToUse) > queuedItems.Count)
                {
                    //this means we're doing the remainder of items
                    int lastThreadsToUse = (queuedItems.Count % threadsToUse);
                    Console.WriteLine("Processing {0} items", lastThreadsToUse);

                    //run in parallel the number of remainder items by calling the process queued item method
                    Parallel.For(0, lastThreadsToUse, _ => processQueuedItem(queuedItems[currentRecordNumber + _]));
                }
                else
                {
                    //this means we're doing a full set of items
                    Console.WriteLine("Processing {0} items", threadsToUse);

                    //run in parallel the number of threads we've been passed by calling the process queued item method
                    Parallel.For(0, threadsToUse, _ => processQueuedItem(queuedItems[currentRecordNumber + _]));
                }

                //increment the current record number by the number of threads we've processed
                currentRecordNumber += threadsToUse;
            }
        }

I'm using a Console application to test this, hence all the Console.WriteLine calls. The method should be self explanatory, it determines how many times it should run and then runs the relevant number of threads each time it is required until it's done. But just for complete disclosure sake, here's the "Main" method of my console app to show you how I tested this:

        /// <summary>
        /// Main application thread
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="args"></param>
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //create a dummy list of queue items
            List<Queue> queuedItems = new List<Queue>();

            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 1, Name = "Apple" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 2, Name = "Banana" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 3, Name = "Orange" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 4, Name = "Pear" });
            queuedItems.Add(new Queue { Id = 5, Name = "Peach" });

            //get the number of threads we want to run in parallel from the setting file we
            //created before
            int threadsToUse = QueueSettings.Default.NumberOfThreads;

            //call the method to do the threading etc.
            processQueuedItems(queuedItems, threadsToUse);
        }

Happy Threading!