Episode 34: *Chirp and Witty – WPF Twitter Clients

This week on Herding Code, Jon, Kevin and Scott K discuss *Chirp (since renamed blu), Witty, Twitter usage, open source and WPF development:

• The guys review *Chirp, a new WPF Twitter client from thirteen23.  Scott compares *Chirp to Paris Hilton, Jon reminisces about old Simpsons episodes and Kevin shares that *Chirp is very pretty, nicely designed, and what WPF is all about.
• Kevin, Jon and Scott discuss their involvement with the Witty project. The guys talk about their favorite features, most wanted enhancements, and how they hope the project will evolve going forward. Jon subtly promises a Witty Easter Egg.
• The guys briefly talk about Twitter, how they manage their “rivers of information” and how varying strategies makes Twitter client design/development difficult.  Not to mention what is/isn’t available via the Twitter API…
• Jon and Scott comment on drive-by contributors and general challenges of open source development.
• The guys candidly talk about learning/knowing WPF and the difficulties of debugging WPF applications without tools.  Kevin shares how WPF violates the principle of least surprise and Jon shares why making a textbox’s background is difficult.

Note: *Chirp has since been renamed to blu. We tried to get the folks from thirteen23 on the podcast, but we didn’t hear back grom them until after this show was published. We still love them, though!

Show Links:

• Witty – http://code.google.com/p/wittytwitter/
• blu – http://www.thirteen23.com/experiences/desktop/blu/
• Snoop – http://blois.us/Snoop/
• Silverlight Spy – http://silverlightspy.com/silverlightspy/introduction/
• Spy++ – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa242713(VS.60).aspx
• ClickOnce – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497348.aspx
• Alan Le – http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/alanl/Blog
• WPF Twitter – http://www.codeplex.com/WPFTwitter
• Model/View/ViewModel (MVVM) – http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman/archive/2005/10/08/478683.aspx
• TweetDeck – http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
• Adam Kinney – http://www.adamkinney.com/
• photoSuru – http://www.photosuru.com/
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) – http://www.codeplex.com/MEF
• WPF Commands – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752308.aspx
• Laurent Bugnionhttp://www.galasoft.ch/
• RSS Bandit – http://rssbandit.org/

Download / Listen:

Episode 34: *Chirp and Witty – WPF Twitter Clients
[audio: //herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0034-Chirp-and-Witty-WPF-Twitter-Clients.mp3]