.Net Foundation On .NET, 22 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: An introduction to Twilio

Description

Twilio enables developers to add rich communication features to their applications via HTTP APIs that can be used with any programming language.

In this episode, Cecil is joined by Twilio Dev Evangelist Corey Weathers. Corey shows us how to get setup with Twilio and their NuGet package in an existing ASP.NET Core application.

[01:02] - What is Twilio?
[03:08] - Enhancing Contoso Crafts with Twilio
[04:54] - Getting setup with Twilio in ASP.NET Core
[13:10] - Inspecting the TwilioClient code
[18:25] - Learning resources

Twilio Quest
https://www.twilio.com/quest

Getting Started with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages
https://www.twilio.com/blog/introduction-asp-net-core-razor-pages

Adding Asynchronous Processing to ASP.NET Core 3.1 Razor Pages Applications Built With the MVVM Design Pattern
https://www.twilio.com/blog/asynchronous-mvvm-asp-dot-net-core-razor-pages

How to use Twilio for voice and SMS capabilities from Azure
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/twilio-dotnet-how-to-use-for-voice-sms

A

In this episode of the on that show, we're gonna have Corey from Coolio coming on, to show us how we can start adding text messaging functionality and really cool features from Tulio instead of our asp.net core application.

A

Hi, everyone welcome to another episode of the Arnett show and today I'm excited I'm, happy I'm, really pumped, because I have my buddy Cory here and he's gonna talk to us a little bit about how we could add, like some really cool functionality with Twilio into our applications. But before we get into that Cory, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit and just let everyone know who you are and what is it exactly that you do.

B

So it's obsessed well thanks for having me I'm, really excited to be here to I, have the privilege of being a developer evangelist! That's really old! So I spend a good bit of my time, figuring out how to serve dotnet developers by helping them build applications that use Twilio, which is really cool. Nice.

A

So could you tell me a little bit about what exactly Tullio is and what what what benefits do we get out of users like your tools and services.

B

Yes, at Swilly o we build a set of api's and services, so you can communicate from your applications. So, let's presume you want to send a text message, make a phone call even send a fax or an email. You can use totally O's API and specifically their platform to do the communication piece for you and it's really easy to use. I'm excited to be able to show it off today, cool.

A

So I'm guessing y'all have API is like both Web API is but also I'm, guessing language SDKs that I could use. So you know, obviously one the on that show, so we're going to talk about the dotnet SDK and how we could add it to like an asp.net, app or but any dotnet up right, like we're talking about windows, forms application or running background service, like you have things that we could use to kind of integrate, that type of functionality, yeah.

B

That's exactly correct: I was actually just using the SDK inside of or specifically the new key package inside of a natural functions, application that I built last week to help us do some monitoring I've seen people use it in even like micro framework applications, which is really interesting. I just talked to another customer who's actually still using the full dotnet framework and they just used this whole EO nuga package. So yeah you can definitely use it across a number of different types of apps. That's interesting. Do.

A

You have any interesting stories about like different ways that you've seen folks use it like have you seen any like? Oh wow, like I, never thought someone would have done this with our it's tools and services. Okay,.

B

So I'm the worst, because I always get this question. I, never know how to answer it. So I'll just tell you one of the coolest demos I've just seen, which is. um There are two magicians who use Twilio as a part of their magic act, and it is one of the most mind-boggling like I, can't even figure out how they're doing it. It is insane to me, but it is incredibly cool and they just did it over zoom, because they've adopted their show to work in a video conference in format.

B

It's amazing to me: I I'm, still perplexed by it. To be honest,.

A

Okay, so why don't we talk a little bit about what we're gonna see today, like what did you bring for us? What are we gonna look at like: what's the story that we want to tell everyone today about how folio works and how easy it is for us to get into an application, yeah.

B

So I had a look at contoso crafts at the web site which, if folks haven't seen it it's the cool website that you can use to really just like build a sort of a product focus website where you could sell products with asp.net core and now they've got actually a little bit of blazer in there, which is really cool. um But I thought to myself like what. If we could use Tullio to actually like share a product that we're interested.

B

In so say, you see a product on there and you want to share it with a friend what, if you could use totally Otis in an SMS with like some information about the product or maybe even a picture of that product. So we're gonna, try to build that today and we're gonna, hopefully knock it out super quickly. So.

A

You know that kind of reminds me of let's say: I'm browsing a website like eek ecommerce application, X I'm not gonna, give anyone any plugs.

A

Okay, ecommerce application, X and I want to share it with, like my family member or one of my co-workers and one of my friends, I'm, like hey I, just bought this or I'm thinking about buying this or hey check this out, and let me know what you think right and we want to have that ability to like easily share it with them, whether it's through like something like whatsapp or telegram, or even SMS, like you're, saying and so Tulio will help us add some of that type of functionality to our applications. Right. We're.

B

Gonna see that.

A

With contoso crats, that's.

B

Exactly right and it's super easy to do and you'll see like once, we put the actual Twilio lines of code in there. You're gonna see it's not actually that many like lines of code that you end up, adding to your code base, which is really cool. Nice.

A

So that means this is gonna, be a short episode.

B

A

Let's take a look: let's switch over to your desktop I'll, take a look at the code and see exactly what this looks like now. I'm guessing you're gonna show us how we can plug Tullio inside of caen social crafts but I'm guessing. You know, in addition to like adding packages and stuff like that, there's probably some configuration that you got right so I'm kind of interested to see how exactly this works. Yeah.

B

That's a good call out so literally to get started if you're working in an asp.net core application like the first step, is just add the Twilio nuga package, I've already added it. It's one package, you'll see it here in my dependencies as soon as I pull up my dependencies here. If I list the packages and um because I've already got it installed, it'll go through and grab everything that it needs to do like any dependencies.

B

It may have I'm gonna close that out because it didn't load up correctly, but here I've got just a con social crafts website, it's it asp.net MVC application and it's actually hosting a blazer component, but there's nothing special about this application. Today that uses anything blazer which is so all of this code is just all blazer stuff, I'm scrolling down to the bottom here, where we'll actually come in and update the c-sharp code to connect over to Leo and so.

A

For folks that aren't familiar with blazer, essentially what you're looking at is a model where we have the HTML and the C sharp in one code like in one code file which is like that dot racer file, so I'm guessing what you're gonna do is, instead of like switching back over to a dot CSV file, or something like that. You got to write code right here and you know that code is gonna. Allow us interact with Twilio and you know, send messages and those types of things right. That's.

B

Exactly correct, so what I've got here is literally one method. This one method here called share product details and you see I've thrown a not new implemented exception. Just so we can build our code, but what I'm gonna do is replace this code. In fact, let's do it right now, so let's go ahead and replace this code with the code. Ditullio needs to actually run so in so doing that what I'm going to do is I'm gonna, say Twilio, client, dot, init and Visual.

B

Studio is already going to complain at me, because I haven't grabbed um my Tullio namespace and now the visual studio is doing something that it shouldn't be doing. Let's wait and see what happens right.

A

So you know this, you know this is good to catch for capture, because this happens to all of us, we'll be using visual studio. I thought.

B

You know it's real.

A

Just does not crash, then you know it's not a real demo, but.

B

A

But essentially, what you're saying now is that you're you're calling this API that will invoke that Tullio clients that init method and exactly right, but now that you haven't installed the new get package right. So you haven't installed like that, those components and libraries that allow you to use Toyo. So as soon as this thing is done, spinning we'll head back over I'm guessing to the manage packages section and I will be able to search for that package and and now some of these function that will just light up inside where that's.

B

Exactly right and everything will work really easily. We've also already got a Tullio phone number, and so what I'm going to do is hook this up so that after we call our init method, we're then gonna have that Tullio phone number send out a text message with the information about the product that we want to share from contoso crafts and so I'm gonna go grab the Tulio package right now and I'm gonna go to Leo search and usually is the first one that comes up so I'll just hit, install and.

A

Actually, while you're there so I'm looking at this thing and there's a couple different packages right like there's two Leo, but it is also just two Leo ASP and the cord is Leo. Yes, peanut NBC right and if I'm building an asp.net core application, I would guess that I'd want the third one right, the asp.net core one. That's.

B

Exactly right, so the between, like Leo versus Ditullio, asp, net dot star packages, is that Leo package is just like the rest, API hopper library. It has some great strongly typed objects to make it really easy to interact with Twilio api. The asp net dot star packages make it really easy for you to build asp.net type applications with Twilio, some API and some so you can add it, but you don't need to.

B

It adds some really nice features on, but we can get away today with not even using any of those and just using the Twilio helper library, Oh awesome.

B

So now that that's installed, I need to go back up to the top of our our raiser component and I need to add in the using Twilio, and this brings everything this brings the namespace into focus for us to take advantage of right. So now that I've added that I'll go back down and look Visual Studio likes this okay. So that's the first bit we've gotten Twilio the helper package, the nuga package added in obviously we're initializing our client, but we need a username and password.

B

This comes from the Twilio console, so I've already signed up for a toilet account. It's got my accounts, it's got my off token I'm gonna copy it and just paste it on over to visual studio and.

A

Then regularly we'd have this. Inside of you know your secrets, manager or your configuration file, but you know this is just a demo. We're.

B

Gonna stop please.

A

Don't do this in your real code? Okay, do do the right thing, that's exactly right! I.

B

Don't want to be the reason why people end up getting in trouble. So yes, but.

A

B

We're gonna do is we're just gonna, send a text message, so I'm gonna save our response, equals a wait and to send the text message with Twilio is as simple as calling this particular resource a message. Resource you'll, see we have a bunch of them in a number of different namespaces. I want the very first one right, um and this fully qualifies it just because Visual Studio is trying to help me out. Thank you, I guess what we're gonna go message: resource dot, create async and you'll, see like we have two versions of this method.

B

One takes a strongly typed object. The second takes a bunch of parameters. Let me just make this really simple. For you. We have a two parameter that takes a specific phone number and I'm gonna. Give that a string value of the specific phone number that we actually get from someone putting the number into console crafts. So this is gonna, be model dot. Two, because I've already got a strongly typed object.

B

There then we've got a from number and this is actually going to be um a to legal phone number and I've already purchased a total phone number earlier before we started our demo, and so this is the number right here.

A

Okay got it I'm.

B

Just gonna paste that in there again something that you would typically put in a config file and then we're sending a text message right. So we should probably and we'll say here- it's just the strings, but we'll say here is the message and I'm gonna do some string interpolation so that we can put in the custom body that someone else willing to put in there there we go now. Let's see why Visual Studio, okay, good, that's gone away. Once you get this response back, we don't necessarily send like a success or fail.

B

What we do is we return. Something called the response that CID right so we'll say: if string dot is null or empty and I should say not response dot CID this means we will have actually sent off the message and everything should work successfully. So I'm gonna say shared message: message shared oh hold on I have one flag I need to set so that everything works successfully. Its message sent there. We go message sent equals true, and that's it all right.

B

So, literally with one two three four five lines of code, we can send the text message from our asp.net core application using Twilio. That's really cool, so.

A

I want to ask a couple questions here, like this, does look fairly straightforward and I'm totally understanding everything that's happening, but I do have two questions really quickly, so on line 194 and you said that there's different versions of that message resource. So, if I'm building a to-do app, how am I supposed to know which one's of those should I use.

B

That's a good question: we try to split it out across different namespaces, and so it's usually the case that the namespace will contain some way to identify specific that you're trying to use, say if you're trying to send a chat message versus maybe a fax message versus maybe a different product that we have, they would be in a different namespace got.

A

It got it alright that make sense, and then the second question on line 196, so I notice, your phone number is in a different format. Right and some folks may or may not know, but like phone numbers can be formatted in all types of different ways, and you know there's brackets and dashes and all kinds of stuff that could be in there. Does the phone number notation need to be a certain way to pass it to the toyo API, or does it format it and parse it and figure it out? It's.

B

A great question it actually does have to be in a specific format and I forget the name but I know it's e 194 format, but the reason why is because it gives us the most accessibility across different regions. As you mentioned, different phone numbers um just come in different formats, so yeah, alright,.

A

Cool all right make sense all right. Let's take, let's run it and see see what happens. Fingers.

B

Crossed this runs first time across.

A

On fingers, man.

A

B

A

Like that jeopardy music, doo doo doo.

B

Doo doo doo doo, that's exactly right!.

A

All right so now the browser is loading up and I'm guessing as soon as this is finished, loading assets and building all that types of stuff. We're gonna see that contoso application shown here on the screen right now boom there he goes. Oh.

B

My goodness, our share button isn't there. Why is our share button? Not there? Oh, don't don't don't. Let's go. Have a look at the code see if we can fix that? Okay.

A

B

Oh because our button did not get at it, so let's take care of this very quickly. Sure we've got this one footer here, that's got our select rating or select product button and I'm gonna go ahead and do two things: let's copy this and paste like most developers, do I mean.

A

Every developer knows how to copy paste. That's.

B

Exactly right, we're gonna call share product details on that one and then we're just gonna say.

B

Go back share product.

A

B

Let me just make sure that that's working well, why is that not working? Well, so we'll take that off and this we should be good to go so this.

A

Okay, there you go all the rest exactly right, so this.

B

Goes back to the thing that we were talking about where we said: hey, you mix up your HTML and you see Sharpe code and everything works. I have to double check, one more thing because I know I had two methods and one share: oh here we go open share. Dialog is the name of it. I'm sorry I called the wrong method. Okay, open share, dialog product dot; ID this way it knows to call this specific product, but to share a specific product. This should now work we're gonna, go ahead and hit the play button.

B

Let's see what happens. Okay,.

A

B

Good so now the page is loaded and we've started up our application. We see our share button is here: I'm gonna go ahead and click that and we've now got a spot where we can put in a phone number and a message that we want to send so for the purposes of our demo. I'm just gonna send this to myself and I'm.

B

Just gonna, say: hey check out this product and once I hit that share button, you'll see it says, message sent successfully and then I'm going to show you my cell phone here, which is going to come up, and there goes the message that we've just sent now. We could also add the picture to this. We could also add additional details about our product to this if we wanted to, but it literally takes just a few lines of code so that it's really cool. That's.

A

Cool so know that number that you showed on your phone just now, that's the number that the message was sent from from Tullio, which is what we have configured here inside of the application and so I'm guessing. If you wanted to you know, you could write it in such a way that you can send it to like a list of people or a single person or a group or whatever the case is right, but but you have that power and that functionality just using this Tullio api. That's.

B

Exactly right- and we make it so easy for you to be able to reuse the same code, to try to send messages through SMS or possibly send picture messages or even to send messages to other channels like whatsapp, which is really cool, cool.

A

So what I want to say is if folks want to, you know, learn how to get in started with Tullio. You know check out some sample apps. You know where's a good place for me to get started. We're like, where should I go to first like to learn about these different api's and things. That's.

B

Such a great question, so we've got this cool application called Twilio quest. It's our 16-bit choose-your-own-adventure way to learn how to code with Twilio. It's one of the best ways, I think to get started, learning about how to use Twitter yo, but if played video games is not your jam. I totally do have the code here set up in a github repo. This will do integration demo um and the URL is just up here on the top, but I know we can probably share it in the show notes, yeah.

A

We'll have all these links in the show notes, so folks can check them out and and also any other resources too, that you you want to want to show us so.

B

Another great resource to check is just to Leo calm, slash, Docs, it's one of the best places to figure out like how to get started with any of to Leo's products and.

A

I know, Doc's are extremely important when you first get started with using it tool. I mean the docs are bad, then, like I'm, not gonna, know right, I'm, not gonna, know where to go or how to do this thing right and I-I've person looked at some of the Tullio docs I'm like they're. Just gorgeous to look at you know like the aesthetics of them, is just really pleasing and I know. Your team works on some of those things right. Yeah.

B

That's exactly correct: we've got between us, the developer, evangelism team and our developer education team. We all work together really try to create the best experience for developers to onboard so in our Doc's there's sample code for you to literally being pasted into your codebase to get started, including some of the code that we wrote today. You could totally just copy it from the docs, but they're, also like different tutorials QuickStart projects walkthroughs and way more technical information. If that's your jam as well, well,.

A

Hey Cory, thank you so much for giving us this really interesting. Introduction into Tullio we'd have to keep this conversation going. I definitely want you to show us a little bit more of some of the other tools and functionality that we can start adding into our applications with Twilio, hey.

B

Thank you for having me today. I'm really excited to have been here. I know, I'm excited to keep chatting to Ali, oh sure, and.

A

Then thank everyone for watching. This has been another episode of the on that show where we learned how to get started with Twilio inside of an asp.net core application.

A