LINQ to Twitter is an open source 3rd party LINQ Provider (Twitter Library) for the Twitter micro-blogging service. It uses standard LINQ syntax for queries and includes method calls for changes via the Twitter API.

Example

The following query returns search results where people are tweeting about LINQ providers:

var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(...);

TwitterSearch? searchResponse =
    await
    (from search in twitterCtx.TwitterSearch
     where search.Type == SearchType.RecentSearch &&
           search.Query == "LINQ to"
     select search)
    .SingleOrDefaultAsync();

if (searchResponse?.Tweets != null)
    searchResponse.Tweets.ForEach(tweet =>
        Console.WriteLine(
            $"\nID: {tweet.ID}" +
            $"\nTweet: {tweet.Text}"));

From a coding experience perspective, the TwitterContext type is analogous to the Entity Framework DBContext. You use the TwitterContext instance, twitterCtx, to access IQueryable<T> tweet categories. In the example above, the TwitterSearch will give you the ability to search Twitter for tweets meeting some criteria.

Note: The ellipses in the TwitterContext parameters indicates that you need to provide an authorizer with credentials, which is required. You can visit Securing Your Applications for documentation on authorizers and visit the Download page for working examples.

Each query category has a Type property for the type of tweets you want to get back. For example, Tweet queries can be made for Mentions, ReverseChronological, or Tweets timelines. Each query category also has an XxxType enum to help you figure out what is available. The example above uses SearchType.RecentSearch to perform searches on matching tweets that happened within the last two weeks or so. Another example would be Like queries which might have LikeType.Lookup as its Type to get all the users who liked a tweet. The Type idiom is consistent across all query categories.

Just like other LINQ providers, you get an IQueryable<T> back from the query. You can see how to materialize the query by invoking the SingleOrDefaultAsync operator. For TwitterSearch results, you receive one TwitterSearch entity that contains metadata about the Search query and also contains a Tweets property that is a collection of Tweet entities. Just like other LINQ providers, LINQ to Twitter does deferred execution, so operators such as ToListAsync and SingleOrDefaultAsync or statements such as for and foreach loops will cause the query to execute and make the actual call to Twitter.

LINQ to Twitter is asynchronous. You can see this where the code above await's the query, using the SingleOrDefaultAsync operator. Commands are async also. e.g. await TweetAsync("Hello from LINQ to Twitter").

For more details on how LINQ to Twitter works, you can visit LINQ to Twitter v6 APIs for API specific examples. The downloadable source code also contains copious examples in the projects. Just look in the Samples folder.

NuGet

In addition to being able to download from this site, you can also automatically install LINQ to Twitter into your projects via NuGet;

Available Feature Set

See LINQ to Twitter v6 APIs.

For more info:

• follow @JoeMayo for releases and related blog posts.